Nominated By: Tarana Burke, Me Too Movement Founder
Age: 32
Based In: Houston
After serving as a National Coordinator for Rising Majority, the director of organizing for the Black Lives Matter Global Network, and chief strategy officer of Me Too International, Nikita Mitchell now works as the chief executive officer of Survivor Society, an incubator for organizers who came together in 2021 following the death of survivor and activist Oluwatoyin Salau.
“Nikita Mitchell is the kind of survivor leader who reminds people that survivor justice is not just a framework but a way of moving through the world with courage, care, and deep accountability to community. Through Survivor Society and her broader advocacy, she has created spaces where survivors feel seen, believed, and empowered not only to heal, but to lead, especially in social justice spaces. Her work is grounded in a fierce commitment to liberation and to building movements that never lose sight of the people most impacted by sexual and gender-based violence. Nikita leads with honesty, compassion, and vision, constantly pushing all of us to imagine and fight for a society where survivors can live freely, fully, and without violence.” —Tarana Burke
Tarana Burke: Survivor Society appears to center both healing and collective power-building. How do you define what survivor-centered leadership looks like in practice, especially in spaces that often tokenize survivor voices rather than truly share power?
Nikita Mitchell: At Survivor Society, we hold a core belief: collective power-building is not possible without healing. Too often, movements are taught to separate political transformation from personal transformation, but we see them as deeply intertwined. Collective healing, to us, is the transcendence of suffering. It’s the process of breaking away from the fear, destructive beliefs, and violent patterns that sustain oppression.
What happens if we win all the changes we’re fighting for? What happens when policies shift and it means the end of war, genocide, femicides, hunger, and poverty? What ensures those victories aren’t eventually reversed or replaced by new forms of violence? Healing does. Expanding our collective capacity for nuance, for difference, for conflict, for grief, for joy, for accountability is what allows a society to sustain freedom over time.
That’s also why survivor-centered leadership means much more than simply placing survivors in positions of power. It means transforming our organizations and communities into spaces where healing can happen alongside the work. Spaces that can hold the messiness that healing requires—the reality of living with violent memories, the contradictions people carry, the moments when survival instincts show up in our spaces.
When I first entered movement work, I was 14 years old. I came carrying the scars of being a Black girl in Oakland having survived assault, degradation at school, and instability at home. I wasn’t polished. I wasn’t focused on healing. I was focused on survival. I wanted to change my school and my community, but internally, I was imploding. Deep down, I didn’t even believe I deserved anything better.
What changed my life was that people in Youth Together, my organization, refused to let go of me. They held onto me long enough for me to build the courage to heal, to love myself, to imagine a future, and to fight for a better world. That experience shaped everything about Survivor Society.
When we built this organization, I was thinking about my 14-year-old self. I wanted to create the kind of space where she would’ve felt fully welcome not despite her messiness, but with it. A space where survivors are encouraged to take up space before they feel “fixed” or fully healed.
Our work is grounded in a set of principles: living in an anti-patriarchal world now, not someday; building relationships slowly and intentionally; embracing curiosity and uncertainty as part of transformation; extending grace to ourselves and one another as we practice freedom. We believe accountability cannot be rooted solely in punishment. We believe survivors are the experts of their own experiences. We believe Black people deserve access to the full range of human emotion. And we believe shame will never lead us closer to liberation.
Sometimes that means slowing down. It means making sure people are actually present in their bodies, in their leadership, and in relationship with each other. Because sustainable transformation isn’t just about changing systems; it’s about changing how we learn to exist with one another while building a world free from sexual violence.
Burke: Your work seems deeply rooted in community and belonging. What do you think traditional institutions—nonprofits, governments, media, and movements themselves—still misunderstand about what survivors actually need to heal and thrive?
Mitchell: Can we be frank for a moment? I’m not convinced most traditional institutions are truly concerned with survivors and our healing. Too often, survivors are treated as useful only for as long as our stories generate attention, momentum, or legitimacy. Media institutions survive off the attention economy. Nonprofits and movements can sometimes rely on survivor narratives to mobilize support, win campaigns, or build audiences. But for survivors, our stories don’t end when the headlines fade or the campaign cycle closes.
Our pain lives in our bodies. We go to sleep with it. A memory can surface on an ordinary Tuesday morning and derail an entire day. The rape I experienced at 19 lasted 30 minutes, but it has taken me more than 13 years and counting to think about that day without collapsing into tears. That’s the reality many survivors live with. Yet institutions often move on from survivors as soon as our stories are no longer seen as useful or compelling.
What I want institutions to understand is this: your actions matter because you shape culture. Institutions are sites of socialization. They teach people what is acceptable, what is valuable, and whose humanity deserves protection.
When media outlets handle survivor stories with care and intention, they teach the next generation how to respond to survivors with dignity. When governments and organizations take sexual violence seriously, they teach people that accountability matters. And when institutions protect survivors’ right to heal—not just their right to disclose—they create a culture where survivors’ needs are respected instead of minimized.
With great power comes great responsibility. Institutions cannot continue treating survivor care as symbolic or temporary. The choices they make ripple outward into families, schools, workplaces, and communities. If we want a world where survivors can truly heal and thrive, then institutions have to move beyond extraction and toward stewardship, responsibility, and long-term care.
Burke: For emerging survivor leaders who want to turn pain into purpose but may not yet see themselves as “leaders,” what lessons have you learned about building sustainable impact, community trust, and long-term change?
Mitchell: I’ll start here: if you have experienced violence—especially gender-based violence—and still found the strength to keep breathing the next day and every day after, then you already carry the capacity to lead. Leadership, at its core, is about inspiring, motivating, and guiding people toward a shared vision. In that sense, leadership is far more accessible than we’ve been taught to believe.
But building sustainable impact and community trust requires something deeper than grit or accomplishment. It requires what I’ve come to understand as liberatory leadership. According to the Liberatory Leadership Partnership, Liberatory Leadership is a practice of leading from wholeness, love, and interdependence. It’s about valuing collaboration over competition, making space for rest, addressing power honestly, and centering those most marginalized in our communities. Sustainable leadership isn’t about performing strength all the time; it’s about creating the conditions where people can thrive together.
I became a “leader” very young. At 14, I was already organizing school improvement campaigns. Over the years, I volunteered with organizations, worked on campaigns, facilitated groups, and trained people across different issues. I learned leadership through the fire of movement work.
But it wasn’t until I was working with Me Too International that I realized my unaddressed trauma was limiting my growth as a leader. I didn’t trust anyone—not even myself. On the surface, I was capable and personable, but underneath that I struggled to build authentic, sustainable relationships. I ignored my boundaries. I hid my concerns. I muted my joy and my silliness. I was coping in self destructive ways. I was constantly afraid of other people, but also of my own shadow.
One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that my inability to address my trauma was shaping the way I built power in community. In many ways, I was using movement work to avoid my responsibility to myself. And eventually I realized that if I wanted to truly experience the intimacy, trust, and joy that community organizing can offer, I had to begin healing, too.
So I started slowly. I went to therapy. I practiced being more honest. I allowed myself to rest. I began seeing myself as more than just useful. I gave myself permission to experience the full range of emotions instead of constantly performing resilience.
And along the way, I became a better leader—a more grounded, effective, and trustworthy one. I think that’s the lesson I want emerging survivor leaders to hear most clearly: your healing is not separate from the work. Your humanity is not an obstacle to leadership. In many ways, it’s the very thing that makes sustainable transformation possible.
Burke: What kinds of conversations are survivors still having privately that you wish the public was ready to hear more honestly?
Mitchell: I think one of the biggest conversations survivors are still having privately is this: we are angry. We are exhausted. And many of us are deeply afraid.
For the sake of survival, safety, or simply maintaining belonging, survivors are often forced to package our feelings into polished, digestible responses. We learn very quickly which emotions the public is willing to tolerate from us. Grief is acceptable in small doses. Resilience is celebrated. Forgiveness is applauded. But rage? Bitterness? Numbness? The truth about how relentless gender-based violence feels? Those emotions are often treated as dangerous, excessive, or inconvenient.
Meanwhile, every passing day brings another rape, another femicide, another missing Black girl no one mobilizes for, another unwanted touch, another catcall, another story of violence that reminds survivors our bodies are still treated as public property. And people expect us to respond to that reality with perfect language, perfect politics, and endless composure.
in your life?
