Amanda J. Pierz, MSc (she/her)
To Zero Initiative
Co-creating a path to end childhood sexual violence
To Zero began in 2021 as a timebound initiative funded by the Oak Foundation. The purpose of this initiative was to bring stakeholders working to end childhood sexual violence (CSV) within their own discipline or area of focus together to articulate a road map to end childhood sexual violence. This work would serve as a strategic visioning and network building process with the goal of bringing together silos and reduce duplicative efforts in practice.
Amanda was brought into the Implementation Team as a Research Consultant in July 2022 to support the work of Dr. Kathleen Cravero. Their initial role in To Zero was to develop a state of play report, summarizing the current body of evidence on CSV, remaining gaps in research and practice and identify areas that leaders in the field agree must be prioritized in the future. In support of this work, she:
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Co-developed the key informant interview guides for To Zero Champions and early-stage Visioning Team participants.
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Co-led key informant interviews with 37 stakeholders from the sector to end CSV, providing qualitative insights that shaped the early To Zero process and sector-wide engagement strategies.
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Led a team of 4 Master's students to provide an analysis of 39 organizational strategies from stakeholders dedicated to ending CSV in accordance with INSPIRE
The full report is available for download via the image below. This report contains:
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A section on evidence with a focus on the INSPIRE framework, a set of seven broadly agreed strategies to end violence against children. Additionally, it highlights four specifiic issues related to ending childhood
sexual violence, i.e., the links between violence against women and violence against children,
sexual violence online, the situation of boys and preventing problematic sexual behaviors.
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A section defining political will, its relation to CSV and how learnings from other sectors may be applied for future action.
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A section summarizing the funding trends of CSV on a global level and costing studies on the impact of CSV among affected individuals, their families and communities.
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A section incorporating key themes and approaches from 39 strategies developed by organizations working to end childhood sexual violence as well as interviews from 79 actors within the field on future directions of work to accelerate action.
Over the course of 8 months, the Implementation Team sought to meet the sector where they already gathered at regional meetings, survivor retreats and conferences to participate in our Visioning Process and engage in regular monthly virtual community meetings to further refine the To Zero vision.
Additionally, Amanda identified a lack of youth representation in our ongoing data collection and creating a series of activities to ensure youth perspectives were integrated into the Visioning Process. Leading a group of 4 Master's students, they conducted a content analysis of organizational strategies and social media engagement from 50 youth-led organization around the world with work streams focusing on CSV and gender-based violence (GBV more broadly). This content analysis fed into a key informant study with leaders of youth-led organizations representing from 5 continents, which is in draft as a peer-reviewed publication. In this final exercise, she organized a three-day convening of global youth leaders in Johannesburg, two of which were identified from the key informant study. The focus of this convening was to hold a Visioning Session centered on the perspectives of youth and gather insights to be integrated into the final deliverables.
In an 18-month process, the views of over 330 stakeholders from around the world were synthesized to develop our final report A Vision to Zero: A Roadmap to Ending Childhood Sexual Violence. In the final months of this collective visioning process, Amanda supported the Executive Director Seán Coughlan full-time in managing iterative input and feedback from the To Zero community to align key findings with actionable recommendations detailed within our report. She supported key events iat the first-ever Global Ministerial Conference held in Bogota, Colombia in both the official conference schedule and as a satellite event to launch the final report. She partnered with the Safe Futures Hub, a joint initiative of Together for Girls, WeProtect Global Alliance and the Sexual Violence Research Institute, in a series of webinars in February 2025 to launch both of our recent reports. Recordings are available of both sessions are available through the Safe Futures Hub.
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