Recognizing Self-Care Awareness Month: Supporting Advocate Well-Being

September is Self-Care Awareness Month, an opportunity to recognize the people who support survivors of domestic violence and to consider what helps advocates remain well, connected, and able to sustain this essential work.

Domestic violence advocates regularly hold complex stories, respond to urgent needs, navigate systems that do not always work as they should, and make difficult decisions with limited time and resources. Over time, these conditions can contribute to burnout, secondary traumatic stress, empathy fatigue, moral injury, and organizational trauma.

Self-care can help, but advocate wellness cannot rest on individual effort alone. A breathing exercise cannot correct an unmanageable workload, unclear expectations, inadequate staffing, or a workplace where people do not feel safe raising concerns. Sustainable well-being requires shared responsibility from individuals, supervisors, teams, and organizational leaders.

Self-Care Is Personal and Organizational

Individual practices can create moments of restoration, strengthen awareness of stress, and help advocates identify what they need. Organizational practices determine whether staff have the time, flexibility, support, and psychological safety to use those tools.

For individuals, self-care might include pausing between difficult interactions, setting boundaries around availability, connecting with trusted colleagues, moving the body, resting, spending time in community, or seeking professional support. The most useful practices are realistic, culturally relevant, accessible, and responsive to changing needs.

For organizations, supporting wellness may include:

  • Workload and role clarity. Set realistic expectations, clarify priorities, and revisit assignments when capacity changes.
  • Supportive supervision. Build regular opportunities for reflection, consultation, feedback, and problem-solving into supervision.
  • Time for recovery. Protect breaks, encourage use of leave, and avoid treating constant availability as a measure of commitment.
  • Psychological safety. Create conditions where staff can ask questions, acknowledge mistakes or uncertainty, raise concerns, and say when something is not working without fear of humiliation or retaliation.
  • Connection and shared learning. Make space for peer support, meaningful debriefing, training, and relationships with other advocacy programs.
  • Policies that match stated values. Review organizational practices for equity, accessibility, trauma-informed supervision, and responsiveness to vicarious trauma.

Try a Two-Minute Mindful Reset

The NYS Trauma-Informed Network and Resource Center's Frontline Workers Wellness Toolkit includes a brief Mindful Table Reset. Although it was created for hospitality workers, advocates and other direct-service professionals can easily adapt the practice.

Between calls, meetings, appointments, or other demanding interactions:

  • Pause. Give yourself permission to stop for a moment before moving to the next task.
  • Breathe. Take a few slow breaths without trying to force a particular feeling.
  • Check in with your body. Notice your posture, unclench your jaw, and allow your shoulders to soften if that feels comfortable.
  • Release the previous interaction. Name what you may need to return to later, then orient yourself to the person or task in front of you.

A short reset does not erase a difficult experience or replace organizational support. It simply gives the mind and body a small transition point before the stress of one interaction carries into the next.

Resources for Advocates and Organizations

Frontline Workers Wellness Toolkit — Interactive tools for direct-service workers, leaders, teams, and organizations, including guidance for creating a wellness plan. Explore the toolkit

Office for Victims of Crime Vicarious Trauma Toolkit — A comprehensive organizational resource for assessing and strengthening responses to work-related trauma exposure. Explore the toolkit

Blueprint for a Vicarious Trauma-Informed Organization — A step-by-step framework for developing a coordinated organizational response to vicarious trauma. View the blueprint

Join the 21-Day Self-Care Challenge

NYSCADV also invites advocates to participate in the 21-Day Self-Care Challenge throughout September. Created by Move to End Violence, the challenge offers daily practices intended to help social change advocates build sustainable self-care habits and strengthen a culture of care across the movement.

Follow NYSCADV on social media for each day's practice, or use the complete packet to move through the challenge at your own pace. View the 21-Day Self-Care Challenge Packet

A Collective Commitment

Advocates deserve more than encouragement to endure difficult conditions. They deserve workplaces that recognize the impact of the work, respond when needs change, and treat well-being as part of effective service provision—not as an optional activity staff must fit into an already full day.

During Self-Care Awareness Month, we invite advocates to identify one small practice that supports them and organizational leaders to identify one condition they can improve. Sustaining the domestic violence movement requires both.