Our Mission & Vision

Our mission is to end all systems of prostitution and sex trafficking worldwide. Our vision is a more equitable world where no one is bought or sold.

 

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Our Story & History

Cherie Jimenez, an activist and survivor of the sex trade, founded the EVA Center, formerly Kim’s Project, in 2006. The Center was created in response to the overwhelming need to assist women in the often-complex process of exiting out of commercial sexual exploitation and to dispel the myths and misconceptions about prostitution.

 

At first, EVA Center was a project located in the same building as the Boston Police Trafficking Unit and was launched in collaboration with Finex House, a domestic violence shelter. The Center’s goal, at this time, was to shift the response for prostitution from arrest to services. As the project grew, it went from a one-woman project to a comprehensive exit program for those who had been isolated and alienated from mainstream traditional social services for so long.

 

Since 2006, EVA Center has provided long-term comprehensive services for hundreds of women, while creating an understanding and awareness of the socio-economic and situational factors that render women and girls vulnerable to the sex trade. Through the vision of its founder, Cherie Jimenez, the EVA Center has become a model nationwide of how to provide programs and services developed and staffed by survivors, for prostituted women. Through new collaborations with the City of Boston and Casa Myrna Vazquez in 2017, the EVA Center now includes a much-needed emergency safe home for nine women and their children.

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What We Believe

EVA Center believes:

• that the Nordic type model of human rights, which decriminalizes all those who are prostituted, provides exit services and makes buying people for sex a criminal offense in order to reduce demand, is the best approach for ending the sex trade.

• that prostitution is a harmful practice that exploits the economic and social powerlessness of women and girls.

• that women and other marginalized groups are caught in cycles of violence and exploitation that are the result of inequality, disempowerment, and isolation based upon patriarchal and cultural gender norms. We work to challenge these norms.