#hEALMETOO Podcast HOME > episode 003: Amanda burden, eric mcgriff & nastia gorodilova

#HealMeToo Podcast Episode 3:

Amanda Burden, Eric McGriff & Nastia Gorodilova on Ways to Heal The Culture

In a live taping at the #HealMeToo Festival, Festival Founder and Artistic Director Hope Singsen interviewed three survivor advocates doing amazing work to help #HealMeToo in our culture:

• Offering bystander training to give people surprisingly simple and often nonthreatening ways to intervene and help deescalate harmful situations in the earliest stages, and alert folks to the ways implicit bias may keep us from helping others in need.  

• Working with men and boys to cultivate healthy masculinity.

• Strategies to center trans and gender nonconforming people and concerns within single sex identified spaces, and to place intersectional practice at the heart of all our violence intervention work.

• Ways to support people as they process allegations of harassment and assault.  

• How Restorative Justice practices can offer communities a path to healing without going through the courts, while requiring all parties to deeply examine their role in achieving accountability, remediation, and culture change.

Amanda Burden is a power-based personal violence interventionist and community educator who serves on the board of directors for okayso, a free app for iOS that connects users with personal questions to experts they can trust for quick, personalized support and advice. Eric McGriff is the Prevention Coordinator for the Crime Victims Treatment Center. Nastia Gorodilova is a practitioner of Restorative Justice and a Senior Coordinator of Systems and Training with the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault.

Your Turn: Ideas & Links

Want to volunteer with survivor advocates in your area? Many offer valuable training in bystander intervention, as well as hospital and rape crisis center support roles. Depending on the issues you’d like to get involved with, to locate organizations near you, try googling terms like “bystander training” or “rape crisis center” or “sexual violence advocacy” or “intimate partner violence support.” Then reach out and ask what volunteering opportunities they offer.

In NYC, you can reach out to:

Crime Victims Treatment Center

NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault

Mt. Sinai Hospital SAVI Program

Episode Guest Bios

Amanda Burden (she/hers) is a passionate New York City-based anti-oppression advocate, power-based personal violence preventionist and community organizer. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from the University of Michigan and has served leadership roles at several local and international agencies as a youth educator, peer supervisor, phone crisis counselor, emergency department survivor advocate and technical trainer. In the prevention field, she has been an invited guest lecturer, panelist and moderator at NYC-based higher educational institutions and community based organizations addressing the topics of power-based personal violence, youth mental health first aid and structural oppression in community spaces. Burden currently oversees primary prevention educational programming and community outreach at a NYC-based rape crisis program and serves as a board member and expert for okayso, a free app for iOS that connects users with personal questions to experts they can trust for quick, personalized support and advice. In her spare time composes and performs music, provides vocals for commercial jingles and writes.

Eric McGriff is the Prevention Coordinator for the Crime Victims Treatment Center. He has been facilitating workshops on violence prevention for about 11 years and, in his time as a preventionist, Eric has worked on prevention initiatives with community based organizations, and national and international organizations, coalitions and work groups, through connections with the Obama White House Administration, The Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women, and the United Nations Women. His focus is on education, training, and mobilization efforts that raise awareness about gender-based violence while working to reduce the factors within a community that condone or promote violence and/or unhealthy relationships. His expertise within the gender based violence prevention field is engaging men and boys. Eric has done extensive work with men and boys in in K-12 schools, on college campuses, and with men who have been convicted of violent crime and are either incarcerated, or recently released from incarceration. His goal is to reach a world free of violence and abuse, where we can all have authentic and healthy relationships. 

Nastia Gorodilova (they/them pronouns) is a queer immigrant survivor and currently the Senior Coordinator of Systems & Training at the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault. Their work focuses on bringing intersectional primary prevention to students and trauma-informed responses to survivors. At the Alliance, they train and provide assistance to over 50 rape crisis programs across New York State. Nastia has worked extensively on Title IX issues and was previously an organizer with the Know Your IX, educating students and policymakers on student rights. Nastia believes in restorative approaches and is movement-building around alternative justice processes for survivors beyond the criminal legal system.