Director
Cherie Jimenez is currently serving as SPACE’s director. She has been a representative of SPACE since its inception in 2013 and served as Board Chair for a number of years. As an activist and survivor of the sex trade, Cherie has over twenty years’ experience in organizing and advocacy work. She is excited to take on this new role and build on the vision of its founder, Rachel Moran.
Cherie drew from her own personal experiences in 2005, creating a comprehensive exit program in Boston that would address the enormous need for specialized services and peer support for those wanting out of prostitution. She, herself, understood the challenges of exiting out and having to re-create a new life role after years of being caught up in systems of prostitution. It wasn’t until later in life that Cherie was able to complete her education, obtaining a degree in management from the University of Massachusetts. She has since worked to identify Boston’s most vulnerable population and how our own failed policies and accelerated inequality here in the US has been contributing to a large domestic sex trade. In one year, over 72% of women that came through the Center reported to have aged out of systems, totally unprepared for life, falling prey to a brutal sex trade.
The EVA Center offers one of the few emergency housing/shelter programs in the country that is able to offer easy access to safety and an array of services. As founder of the EVA Center, she served as director until recently when she offered to come on to SPACE Intl, wanting to continue the important work of building a strong voice of survivors from around the globe to change how we think about prostitution and push for policy changes. The mission of the Center was to advocate for policy changes that would end the need for programming, therefore, it was important to be part of a larger movement of change, therefore, EVA Center became a member of CAP, the coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution, which consists of 35 frontline organizations from 27 different countries, which Cherie currently serves as President.
Having initiated and championed legislation in the state of MA in 2020, being part of an organization that works to elevate the voices of survivors is critical to furthering legislation everywhere that will rid the world of this harmful practice.
