About
Our Mission
We design collective healing spaces that ignite the celebration of sexuality and nurture transformative connections across every generation
Our Values
Our Story
Heal Sweet Home was birthed by the Heal Project, which aimed to prevent and end childhood sexual abuse. At a time when ending childhood sexual abuse was not a priority for most organizations, the Heal Project was a necessary and trailblazing initiative that for nearly a decade, contributed to groundbreaking healing practices and abolitionist frameworks. Now, with deeper clarity in services, audience, and vision, Heal Sweet Home has been formed to focus on transforming society beyond the “end” of childhood sexual abuse, and into the beginning of connected healing that liberates our homes and our world.
Our Team
Ignacio G. Rivera (they/them)
Founding Co-Executive Director
Ignacio G Hutía Xeiti Rivera, M.A., is a cultural sociologist with expertise in sexual trauma, healing, and liberation for marginalized people. They are an internationally known gender non-conforming speaker, trainer, and consultant. Ignacio uses they/them/their is the founding co-director of Heal Sweet Home.
Aredvi Azad (they/them)
Founding Co-Executive Director
Aredvi Azad (they/them) is an educator, speaker, and trainer in sexual healing & liberation. As a queer & trans/non-binary Irani-American immigrant, Aredvi has been speaking and producing educational media about sexual trauma and healing for over a decade. Aredvi is the founding co-director of Heal Sweet Home.
Scout Panagacos (they/she)
Operations Specialist
Scout (they/she) is a queer pixie, lover of sensual pleasure, and settler on Coast Salish Land in Seattle, Wa. They are a non-monogamous femme who loves working with visionaries and weirdos to make beautiful and functional spaces, events, and organizations. Scout expresses love for the collective by making systems that create welcoming entry points & organizing structures that encourage belonging. Scout has worked with local and national organizations to prompt healing through combatting consumer culture and creating decentralized collective power. When they are not in the details, Scout writes about contemporary queerness, heartbreak, material resources, and how all these topics are connected.
Demi McCoy (she/they)
Communications & Marketing Specialist
Rev. Demi McCoy (she/they) is a Black queer creative strategist, visual designer, writer, and affirming faith leader. She is the founder of OutFind Creative, a brand design agency that centralizes equity and cultural alignment. Her work primarily focuses on Black liberation, queer expression, health advocacy, and self-motivation. McCoy holds a Master of Divinity from Wake Forest University and a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from Pepperdine University.
Our Roadmap
RASHIM is a demystifier of the world of sex and sexual relations. It contains more than three decades of combined experiences of Mx. Rivera and Mx. Azad, two intersectional sexuality educators who have dedicated their work to healing sexual trauma through sexual liberation. This is why Power sits at the heart of RASHIM to represent that every element of sexuality must be understood within the existing power relations, and that redistribution of power is essential to the work of sexual healing and liberation.
The programs offered at The HEAL Project are based on RASHIM and explore different aspects of this model.
The Rivera-Azad Sexual Healing Integration Model (RASHIM) offers a roadmap for sexual healing that captures the past, present, and future of our sexual relations. RASHIM locates nine areas of sexuality navigation, referred to as Pillars. Each Pillar represents a unique step in human sexual evolution and contains experiences, ideas, feelings, and actions. While the pillars are interconnected and relevant throughout our lives, they are categorized into three stages: rooting, growing, and yielding.
The Orbit of Connection transforms the information discussed within Pillars and the Foundation into life skills. Relationships are what make us human. This includes our relationship with ourselves, our family, our community, and the state. Information alone cannot heal our individual and collective sexual wounds. It is through good connections and community involvement that we can apply our knowledge to heal and create change. These connection skills include empathy, accountability, compassion, boundary-setting, and the like.
The outermost layer of RASHIM is the Cycle of Healing. This is where the ongoing and cyclical work of healing takes place. Trauma not only disturbs our connections, but it threatens our survival and takes away our sense of safety. Healing must begin with providing conditions of safety so that we can explore different possibilities for integrating with ourselves and others. In the process of exploration, we may be disappointed, heartbroken, triggered, or even re-traumatized. This is when acceptance is needed to facilitate a path back to safety.
Our current relationship to human sexuality is built upon historic realities of reproduction, gender, and sex, especially as they pertain to marginalized communities (e.g. people with disabilities, people of color, poor people, labor migrants, and refugees). Understanding systems of marginalization throughout history as well as their current manifestation in our culture is required in any discussion of who we are and how we relate to sex and relationships. Culture itself is an integral piece of how we shape our ideas and the kind of information we believe to be true. Lastly, without a vision, we are bound to repeat past mistakes. Active visioning is necessary for productive engagement and for creating a world without sexual violence.
Sexual healing is not a one-dimensional or an individual journey. As a society, we have a responsibility to collectively heal our sexual relations across our communities, institutions, and governing bodies. We must heal the fear-based and shame-based approaches to sex. Expanding our idea of sex beyond its heteronormative and reproductive aspects, we must focus on navigating sexual relations safely, intentionally, and powerfully.