Some work continues beyond the moment it is created.
For decades, my work has moved through direct service, public policy, education, philanthropy, and spaces created for listening.
The Lisa C. Williams Listening Room
In 2020, I endowed and dedicated the Lisa C. Williams Listening Room at Boston University’s Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground.
The room was created as a place for quiet.
No devices.
No performance.
No requirement to arrive at an answer.
A room in which one might become still enough to hear oneself.
Endowed Legacy
Three 100-year academic endowments at Boston University extend the work beyond a single life:
The Circle of Friends Impact Fund
The Circle of Friends Impact Legacy Fund
The Design for Equity & Inclusion Fund
Rachel’s Law
Work alongside children who experienced commercial sexual exploitation and survivors of human trafficking eventually entered public policy through Georgia’s Safe Harbor/Rachel’s Law Act.
Developed through the I AM Rachel coalition, Rachel’s Law became the first Safe Harbor law in the United States named in honor of a child survivor of sex trafficking.
The work affirmed something survivors had long known:
Their voices belonged not only in conversations about their lives, but in the rooms where systems and laws affecting those lives were shaped.
Global Survivor Leadership
That practice later entered an international room.
As inaugural Chair of the International Survivors of Trafficking Advisory Council of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, I served alongside survivor leaders bringing lived expertise into international anti-trafficking policy and practice across the OSCE’s 57 participating States.
Different rooms.
Different forms.
The same practice of listening.