community

Meet Our Teams

April 15, 2021 April 15, 2021

This week, in honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), we highlight the amazing work of our teams at ZCenter. Each team plays a crucial role in supporting survivors and ending sexual violence.

Counseling

ZCenter’s mission is to validate, believe and empower all survivors of sexual violence. We believe healing from sexual trauma is possible. Our trained counselors create a safe space for our clients, where they can share their experience, build resiliency, and regain control over their lives. ZCenter offers free counseling in Lake County and Northern Cook County.

Outreach & Advocacy

Every single day, every 73 seconds, an American is subjected to sexual violence. Part of our mission is to work with those that have been violated, but the role of the Outreach and Advocacy Team is to promote awareness and educate the community around sexual health, safety, and rights. Through prevention education, professional development, volunteerism, and social justice

activism, the Outreach Team reaches thousands of people annually to spread information and awareness. During this difficult time, ZCenter’s community outreach has evolved to include a broad digital presence, beginning a podcast (73 Seconds) and a blog, showcasing how important it is to end sexual violence and dismantle the systems responsible for sustaining it.

Development

Development means different things in various industries. For ZCenter, it means fundraising. But more than that it means bringing awareness to all of the needs at

ZCenter, to ensure we have the financial resources available to keep our services strong, necessary supplies, and support for our growing Outreach Programs. Fundraising comes from corporate donations, individual contributions, monthly giving (check out our Superhero Campaign!), and foundations through grant applications.

Administration

Hi, my name is JoEllen and I am part of the Amazing Administration Team at ZCenter! Our team plays an important behind the scenes role in contributing to the comprehensive services provided to survivors of sexual violence by the ZCenter Staff, Interns and Volunteers.

Office management, budget and finance, data entry and stats management, government reporting and compliance, payroll and record keeping are all successfully orchestrated by the team of Helen Williamson-Administrative Specialist, Jessica Gonzalez-Financial & Facilities Assistant, JoEllen Erdman-Compliance Manager, and our fearless leader, Cindy Harris-Director of Administration. We take great pride in making sure that the office runs smoothly and the employees get paid so they can put all of their energies into providing the best trauma-informed care to the survivors we work with every day!

All ZCenter blog posts are written by state certified staff, interns, and volunteers. For questions on authorship or content, please email info@zcenter.org.

Forgotten Voices in STEM: Rosalind Franklin

March 25, 2021 March 25, 2021

The month of March is Women’s History Month and so we are focusing on forgotten voices of women throughout history. This week, we’re highlighting the work of an incredibly influential woman who is only spoken of briefly in biology courses despite her huge accomplishments. Seventy years ago, a young Rosalind Franklin looked over an X-Ray photograph and discovered something that would go on to change how we understand life. This discovery eventually led to a university here in Lake County, IL being named after her. Unfortunately, even though her legacy lives on locally, she also got the very raw end of the deal when it comes to her own discovery.

Franklin was born in Notting Hill, London in 1920. At the beginning of her life, her family noticed how quickly she had picked up a love and understanding of maths and sciences, her intelligence even surpassing those subjects and eventually mastering the French, Italian, and German languages. It was only at the age of 16 that Franklin began to dedicate her time to science entirely. Majoring in physical chemistry at one of the only women’s colleges, Newnham College at Cambridge University, Franklin immediately went on to work as a research assistant with the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) after her bachelor’s degree. At BCURA, she studied the absorption of coal and the research she did eventually led her into her dissertation for her doctorate degree in 1945.

After earning her doctorate, Franklin was accepted into a position at Paris’ Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat, where she worked on X-Ray imagery, leading her to her primal discovery just a short few years later in 1951. While studying DNA structure with assistant Raymond Gosling, Franklin discovered that DNA had a double helix structure in a photo now branded Photograph 51, serving as the evidence for the new understanding of DNA. Unfortunately, a colleague showed this photograph to James Watson, who took the evidence to further prove his and Francis Crick’s own research on the structure without Franklin’s permission. They went on to publish a paper on the structure of DNA with no credit given to Franklin, despite her photograph being a prominent factor of evidence.

Franklin continued on to new areas of research, publishing a number of papers on viruses in the five years after her discovery. The impact of her work helped build many foundations of understanding viral structure, which was incredibly important to physiological research. Still, Watson and Crick went on to receive a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine years after Franklin’s death from ovarian cancer in 1958, giving no credit to Franklin.

Rosalind Franklin is only one account of women’s voices being lost within the larger influence of men, having not been acknowledged for this contribution until after her death, and while it may not be the last, there is power in recognizing those lost voices. This month we have highlighted multiple women that paved the way for so many others in history. Join ZCenter as we strive to keep these voices alive while raising up the voices of women today.

Maisel, M., & Smart, L. (1997). Rosalind Elsie Franklin: Pioneer molecular biologist. Retrieved

March 22, 2021, from https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/franklin.html

Rosalind Franklin: A Crucial Contribution. (2014). Retrieved March 22, 2021, from

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/rosalind-franklin-a-crucial-contribution-6538012/

Rosalind Franklin: Biographical Overview. (n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2021, from

https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/kr/feature/biographical

Stormé DeLarverie: Stonewall and Beyond

March 23, 2021 March 25, 2021

It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn’t no damn riot.

— Stormé DeLarverie

This Women’s History Month, we celebrate the life of Stormé DeLarverie, and although recounts of Stonewall are uncertain of whether Stormé threw the first punch, she was extremely influential in fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights throughout her life. Stormé was born in the 1920s; at the time, her mother was a Black servant in the home of her white father; the two eventually married and moved to California.

Stormé was the Master of Ceremonies for Jewel Box Revenue, a group of 25 men and Stormé which entailed a gender-bending performance where Stormé presented as a cisgender man in the first integrated drag show in the U.S. in the 1940s. Stormé was a butch lesbian who fought fiercely for the rights of all individuals. While living in New York City, Stormé became a motherly figure within the LGBTQIA+ community, being sure to handle any “ugly” she saw. She used the term ugly to define bullying, abuse, or intolerance of people within the LGBTQIA+ community. This fearlessness afforded Stormé the nickname of being the “Rosa Parks of the gay community” (Windy City Times, 2014). Throughout her life, Stormé was also a bouncer at Cubby Hole’s bar in New York, where she worked until she was 85. For Stormé, this was not a movement but fighting for a lifestyle where everyone could live their life freely as they wanted to.

In the New York Times obituary remembering Stormé, one of her legal guardians, Mrs. Cannistraci exclaimed, “She literally walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero; she was not to be messed with by any stretch of the imagination.” We hope to emulate the same fierceness that Stormé had throughout her lifetime in our work supporting survivors and ending sexual violence against all individuals.

Brownworth, V. (2015). The Herstory Pride Archives: why recording our lesbian history is important. Curve (San Francisco, Calif.), 25(3), 16–.

HELLER, M. (2020). The “First Punch” at Stonewall: Counteridentification Butch Acts. In Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender-Bending (pp. 115-151). Bloomington, Indiana, USA: Indiana University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctvtv93wm.8

Iconic activist storme DeLaverie passes away. (2014, Jun 04). Windy City Times Retrieved from http://flagship.luc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/iconic-activist-storme-delaverie-passes-away/docview/1538315297/se-2?accountid=12163

https://theriveter.co/voice/it-wasnt-no-damn-riot-celebrating-stonewall-uprising-activist-storme-delarverie/