About TASSC
Who are TASSC Survivors?
TASSC Survivors come from many different backgrounds and countries around the world. Each survivor has had a unique experience, but they share one thing in common - they are courageous people persecuted for standing up for human rights.
While each experience varies, TASSC survivors were often tortured for participating in peaceful demonstrations, joining an opposition political organization, criticizing their government in the media, refusing to join the ruling party, being related to a political dissident, or because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
“I advocated for the preservation of the environment and for gender and minority rights. I was persecuted for denouncing corruption, criticizing the dictatorship in my country and for supporting a fellow journalist who was physically attacked by the police.”
Our Integrated Model
The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) takes an integrated, trauma-informed, and survivor-centered approach to its work with survivors of torture. We aim to integrate and enhance community-focused and trauma-informed principles into our service provision. All of our staff work with survivors through a strength-based perspective, focusing on resilience and each survivor’s own strengths as they move toward a brighter future. We work with, not for survivors as they move toward achieving their goals. We operate from a culturally-sensitive lens, and believe survivors know what is best for them in their approach to healing and empowerment.
Our interdisciplinary model also allows for coordination of care that addresses all aspects of a survivor’s wellbeing – from community and social connection, to legal, advocacy, mental health, and career support. TASSC addresses the wide range of each survivor's physical and emotional needs, offering support from the most basic need, and on to each step as they find the care and strength they need to recover. To avoid re-traumatization, we have redesigned our services delivery model to be clear, concise, and transparent, allowing survivors to feel empowered and to increase staff collaboration to best advocate for survivors. Survivors are an active and integral part of their service provision and collaborate with TASSC staff at each step of the process.
We aim to provide a “second home” for survivors in a warm, caring environment where they can begin to heal. Aside from our service provision, we function as a drop-in center, where we encourage survivors to come at any time during office hours to enjoy coffee, have a snack, speak with staff, attend events and workshops, or to use computers and borrow books from the library. Our doors are open to survivors of all ethnic, racial, gender, political, and religious identities.
Our goal is to help survivors tap into the strengths they already have. We are building on assets, not deficits, and helping survivors find the resources they need to create a path forward to a new life in the United States.
Survivors in their own words
“To be a survivor means to learn from the bad and painful experience of torture - to stand up, work hard and help others. As a survivor, I have not been broken; I have become stronger.”
“TASSC has helped me so much with the healing process. Caring case managers let me share the terrible torture I suffered and allowed me to release my feelings. At TASSC, I also had the chance to meet other people from my country with similar experiences, which made me realize I was not alone.”
“TASSC’s support and the staff’s wholehearted effort to help every survivor who knocks on their door is the reason for my and hundreds of other survivors’ success in the US.”
“TASSC broke down the loneliness and the silence I was confined in. I was introduced to its great diverse community - my new family - where I always find somebody to listen to me, to laugh with me, to smile with me, and to suffer with me...sharing my pain.”
OUR FOUNDER
Sr. Dianna Ortiz
SEPTEMBER 1958 - FEBRUARY 2021
Ortiz, a Roman Catholic Ursuline nun, founded TASSC in 1998 and served as its first executive director for the following 10 years. Before launching TASSC, through her work with the Guatemala Human Rights Commission (USA), she came into contact with other survivors of torture and was struck by the common language she and other survivors used to describe the trauma and emotions they experienced.
This shared understanding helped her gain the insight she needed to start the first organization led by torture survivors to support other survivors.
In the years after her own torture, Ortiz began to speak to torture survivors from across the world—Armenia, Ethiopia, Honduras, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
Finally, this visionary advocate took the first step by bringing together a small group in Washington, DC—torture survivors along with individuals committed to human rights—to explore the idea of starting a nonprofit that would be dedicated to advocacy to end torture and to support the full range of survivors’ needs.
Though Ortiz was often identified as TASSC’s founder, she insisted that the organization never would have gotten off the ground without the support of this core dedicated group of survivors and donors, many of whom continue their support for TASSC today.
Ortiz said: “We turned to the larger community for both guidance and assistance--from lawyers to psychologists, from doctors to teachers to artists; from fundraisers to directors of NGOs. I think of Antonio Machado’s words: ‘Traveler, there is no path, the path must be forged as you walk.’ That’s exactly what we did. We forged forward with the support of the community.”