Founders Feature: Stories of Consent, Emily Bach & Maya Siegel
Stories of Consent Founders, Emily Bach and Maya Siegel, sit down with FEMINIST to share their founder stories and personal activism journeys.
Q: What inspired Stories of Consent?
EB & MS: Most of us don’t learn enough about consent in school. In the United States alone, only 13 states mandate comprehensive sex education and 16 states require abstinence-only education [SIECUS]. Instead, most teach consent through simple phrases like “no means no.” As a result, extensive studies demonstrate that young people consistently fail to interpret what consent looks like.
We started Stories of Consent, an organization devoted to community-based consent education, to make consent education more accessible, actionable, and relatable to young people.
Q: What motivates you in your activism journey?
EB: I draw most of my hope from the people around me, who subtly reveal that even amidst a country wrought with violence, there are people who fight for love. Tender, unexpected moments are most important to me. Holding hands with survivors at the Capitol in protest. Receiving messages of support from people countries away. Watching those people form coalitions to fight for justice. I believe in a better, more just world because in the pockets of this one, it is already being built.
MS: Being in community with so many incredible people who are doing this work and putting love at the center. I believe that everyone has good inside of them and that each of us has something unique and necessary to contribute. Investing in communities and creating solutions with others are core values of mine.
Story submission of affirmative consent by a 25-year-old from the USA
Q: How have your lived and shared experiences shaped your approach towards founding Stories of Consent?
EB: Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist organizer, is well-known for her phrase “hope is a discipline.” Whether or not you consider yourself an activist, I think many of us are familiar with trying to find hope amidst an environment that’s hostile to it. Especially in a political climate where survivors are routinely disempowered, it’s important to believe that something other than violence is possible.
Stories of Consent was founded out of a hunger for hope. That hunger was both collective, in that we wanted something tangible for anti-sexual violence organizers to work towards, and individual. As someone with a difficult history with consent, reading the submitted stories has helped me understand that sexual violence was never inevitable.
MS: I’ve spent the past five years doing work I believe in wholeheartedly because of the people who mentored me, believed in my potential, and allowed me to do this work. During this time, my bosses and teams have been predominantly POC women who work to normalize things like period talk + period care accessibility, expanding what professionalism looks like, centering BIPOC voices in the environmental movement, pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors at a young age. Seeing this representation and being part of teams with the same value of intersectionality has definitely influenced Stories of Consent’s approach to center joy and people.
SOC Exhibit at the University of Sydney, June 2023
Q: From your perspective, how is amplifying voices of personal stories and intersectional feminism intertwined?
EB: Often, when we think of learning, we imagine classrooms and lectures. There’s something very real there, in that many of us learn about politics and history through formal education spaces. But, we also learn a lot from each other, in ways we probably don’t even recognize. Our ability to empathize with other people comes from thoughtfully listening to them. We learn almost everything we know about personal relationships through this empathy, from how to make others feel loved, to how to enable love for ourselves.
Many of my favorite writers use love and liberation interchangeably. Politically, the project of intersectional feminism is about liberation for feminine people. Still, femininity is a vast and varying experience. If we’re going to create a truly intersectional political movement, we need to be able to empathize with people from different histories than our own. I believe stories are capable of teaching us to do so. At their best, I think they can inspire a genuine empathy for one another, capable of mobilizing people for systemic change.
MS: Stories of Consent addresses sexual violence and consent from a proactive, gender-inclusive perspective. We share personal community-sourced stories as a method of education that holds space for all identities and experiences and, to me, intersectional feminism is about honoring diverse and intertwining identities.
Q: Are there any new launches or features happening we should look out for?
EB & MS: We’re partnering with SafeBAE as our fiscal sponsor, empowering us to expand our programming and resources. If you’re interested in helping us push personal community-based consent education on your campus, reach out by DM or email at hello@storiesofconsent.com! Additionally, be sure to follow @storiesofconsent on Instagram and at storiesofconsent.com!
Q: What does intersectional feminism mean to you?
EB: To me, the strongest form of understanding is knowing where your own knowledge stops. For that reason, I think about intersectional feminism primarily through solidarity. How do we learn the boundaries of our own experiences? How can we thoughtfully and meaningfully show up for people different from us? These are difficult, layered questions. They’re also crucial to building a truly intersectional feminist movement.
Consent sounds like graphic, Valentines Day 2023
MS: To me, intersectional feminism is about equity, liberation, and community. It’s about acknowledging the different things we bring to the table and being able to live a life that honors our full selves.
Emily Bach is a writer, researcher, and organizer against sexual violence. She has been nationally recognized for her poetry, essays, and short stories on women’s lives. Her research on community-based consent education is endowed by the Laidlaw Foundation, where she is a fellow. As a community organizer, her work for sexual violence survivors won the Gold Award for Youth Organizing and the Youth Innovator Award of 2023, among others. She is the co-founder of Stories of Consent. Her work has been recognized by the US Department of State, the National Women’s Health Network, Duke University, and more.
Maya Siegel is a Coloradan who advocates for people and the planet. At 18 years old, she helped start an environmental nonprofit and at 20 an inclusive period care company that now has products in 400+ Target stores nationwide. Maya has worked in social impact roles since 2017 and is the co-founder of Stories of Consent. For her work, she was named Social Innovator of the Year 2023 by the Oak and Tides Foundation and LookUp and 2023 Vital Voices Visionary Leader. She has spoken at the U.S. Department of State, Microsoft, and Colorado State University.
