After Drag Story Hour events around the country experienced an increase in anti-LGBTQ threats and violence in 2021, Audacia and their team at AVP collaborated to create a series of event safety planning, safety marshal, and venue-specific planning workshops to support LGBTQ groups with an approach that does not rely on policing but instead trains up community members in upstander intervention, de-escalation, and other tactics. This training has been modified and updated as ICE threats to community safety increase.

AVP offers standalone online and in-person trainings and in spring 2024 piloted a free, six-week community safety planning training for small LGBTQ groups in vulnerable regions of the U.S.

Request an AVP training here and follow AVP on Instagram for upcoming free, public trainings.

After the November 2022 mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Audacia and the leadership teams at AVP and Strength in Numbers Consulting developed a survey of LGBTQ safe spaces to learn more about the frequency and severity of violence and threats and to aid in developing a large scale response.

The publication Under Attack: 2022 LGBTQ+ Safe Spaces National Needs Assessment found that groups were experiencing frequent incidents, harassers were often white nationalists, and groups needed training and security measures.

Read the full report: Under Attack: 2022 LGBTQ+ Safe Spaces National Needs Assessment. Ray, Audacia, Tillery, B., Frazer, S., Hasford, S. and Givens, O. New York City Anti-Violence Project: 2023.

Read the report:

Individual Struggles, Widespread Injustice: Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People’s Experiences of Systemic Employment Discrimination in New York City. Audacia Ray, Lolan Sevilla, and Teal Inzunza. New York City Anti-Violence Project: 2018.

In fall 2013 the State of New York Unified Court System announced the Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs). In 2014 Audacia led Red Umbrella Project staff and members to conduct an observational study,  documenting the HTICS in Brooklyn and Queens to figure out what happens in the court rooms and how they handle prostitution related charges. RedUP released the first sex worker-led report on the HTICs on October 1, 2014. The courts have since been dismantled. Read about the campaign and research in The Daily News, Vice, and The Nation. 

Read the report:

Criminal, Victim, or Worker? Impacts of the Human Trafficking Intervention Courts on Adults Arrested on Prostitution-Related Offenses in New York. Audacia Ray and Emma Caterine. Red Umbrella Project: 2014.

In a state with a major free condom program and in a city with the only municipally-branded condom in the world, it was shameful that for years, the Department of Health gave away condoms only for the New York Police Department to confiscate them and arrest people for prostitution offenses. The Access to Condoms campaign targeted state legislators, district attorneys, and police commissioners to cease this practice. In 2013, several district attorneys banned condoms as evidence, the NYPD banned the use of condoms as evidence for most charges in 2014, and the NY state bill was partially passed in 2014 and improved in the 2015 state executive budget.

​See the comics campaign Audacia developed in 2012 (activists sent more than 1000 postcards to state legislators), read about the early years of the campaign, and watch a video about a sex worker lobby day in Albany.

In December 2010, prompted by the advocacy of the family of the missing Shanna Gilbert, the remains of four sex workers were found on Gilgo Beach in Long Island, with searches later expanding the bodycount to 11. This spurned Audacia and many colleagues into years of advocacy and grief work, starting with the Protect, Don't Prosecute campaign, which successfully advocated for the Suffolk County district attorney's office to grant amnesty from arrest for sex workers with information about the case. Though Shannan Gilbert's murder has remain unsolved, in 2023 an arrest was made of a Long Island man responsible for at least four murders.