BAYSWAN

Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network (BAYSWAN), is a non-profit organization in the San Francisco Bay Area which works to improve working conditions, increase benefits, and eliminate discrimination on behalf of individuals working within both legal and criminalized adult entertainment industries. The organization provides advice and information to social service, policy reformers, media outlets, politicians, including the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution and Commission on the Status of Women (COSW), and law enforcement agencies dealing with sex workers.

BAYSWAN was founded as a collaborative project sponsored by the San Francisco-area Exotic Dancers Alliance and the Coalition on Prostitution and Street Outreach Services Consortium, which included the Asian AIDS Project, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, Inc., the Institute for Community Health Outreach, New Leaf Community Services, Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, and Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center. Its purpose at founding was to create a network of social service organizations, service providers, and community members to advocate on behalf of sex workers, massage parlor employees, escorts, exotic dancers, and other sex industry workers to protect their civil, human, and workplace rights as well as to improve communication between sex industry workers and government agencies, social service providers, and other organizations throughout the Bay Area. BAYSWAN's efforts encompassed the financial, housing, social support, mental health, and medical needs of sex industry workers, including HIV/STD prevention, substance abuse issues, harm reduction, and protection from violence.

BAYSWAN's principal work is to make available resources provided by sex workers' and other human rights-based organizations about the rights of sex workers and others employed in the adult entertainment and sex industries, including prostitution and exotic dancing. Information is provided through the organization's website and through the media as a source for stories or opinion pieces relating to sex workers and sex industries. Bayswan also works to improve working conditions and to eliminate discrimination against workers within both the legal and criminalized adult entertainment industries, and organizes sex worker rights advocates who work at various agencies as outreach workers.

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