Our members use an intersectional justice, harm reduction, and human rights based approach to fighting for labor rights.
The Ishtar Collective was created in January 2020 due to lack of an organization dedicated to sex workers and survivors that was led by people with lived experience in Vermont.
In 2025, our core values are reignited in the wake of rising injustice: we’ve done this before, we will do it again. Crisis response has been a founding action of our grassroots efforts; and the compass of work from our members demonstrates active alternatives to systems that exclude the working class through criminality and stigma.
We began in simple policy- and self- advocacy, but soon had to pivot and address the needs of our disabled queer and trans sex worker members, who were suffering from a food and housing crisis under the pandemic.
We organize our direct services in the form of food, housing, and healthcare in addition to our policy advocacy and adult education work; because people couldn’t get food in rural Vermont, were getting kicked out of their homes because they could not work, and were explicitly being declined government-distributed pandemic-relief funds as sex workers.