How Andrée Collective leverages the
wedding industry to strengthen survivors
By Ellie Shuert
A sign Reese was healing was the paint on her jeans.
A couple years before, she couldn’t make art. Survival was her full-time job and it paid nothing, unless you counted the money she made from selling food stamps. Her prior artistic life of bouncing from one creative endeavor to another—dancing, upcycling clothing, playing drums, painting—was traded for one where drugs, gang members, and the threat of trafficking lay around every corner. Every turn she made led to danger, even what seemed like the “right” ones.
On the cruelly ironic night before she planned to move into a safe house, she was assaulted by a stranger in Old City. Though for most victims of sexual assault the perpetrator is someone they know, Reese’s statistically fringe encounter furthered her growing suspicion that she would always be in danger. “I didn’t know why I was even here,” she told me. “I thought, if this is just going to keep happening to me, I don’t want to live.”
This despair continued until 2022, when she met Samantha Mathews. A clinical mental health therapist, Sam had always wanted to support the community of domestic and sexual abuse survivors, and her own childhood experiences and future roles in non-profit fundraising made her attuned to their needs. She knew that if she wanted to make a lasting impact for this large community, she had to be creative. Eventually, Sam’s new project, Andrée Collective, reached Reese’s ears. And going against every instinct she developed to survive, Reese decided to trust her.
Andrée Collective, founded in 2021, is a Philadelphia-based non-profit that provides group trauma therapy and financial literacy courses for survivors of partner violence and sexual assault. The therapy curriculum covers different aspects of relational trauma, triggers, and the brain-body connection. Courses on financial literacy fill what Sam observed to be a huge gap in rehabilitation programming for survivors. Economic abuse largely prevents women from leaving their relationships since, without funds, there’s no life to escape to.
“Most women and children who are homeless are homeless because of domestic violence, so it is more of a problem than the average person would realize,” she said. The courses have been an overwhelming success. “We’ve had people who have come through the financial literacy program feel confident enough to apply for the first time homebuyer grants, have an emergency fund for the first time, pay out of student loan debt—these are big deals!”
Along with financial literacy, survivors need the skills and means to generate their own income. The answer, for Sam, lay in a social enterprise model where they could leverage one of the most lucrative industries as a site for reemployment training: weddings.
After completing one of Andrée Collective’s programs, women have the opportunity to apprentice for nine months under professional wedding planners. Andrée Collective’s event planning services not only net the organization 20 percent of their operational cost—a blessing for non-profits who rely almost exclusively on philanthropic donations and grants—but they also give the opportunity for women to support women, since the wedding industry is largely female-dominated. Brides often make decisions in the process, and the majority of wedding vendors and businesses are women-owned.
Besides, weddings consistently generate over $70 billion every year. “It’s like hyper-capitalism,” Sam jokes. “Weddings are expensive!” In 2023, the average American couple spent 35,000 dollars on their wedding ceremony and reception. Booking Andrée Collective’s services gives those dollars a chance to have an enduring impact past the party and not wilt along with the flower petals.
Weddings hold a unique place within the events industry. Ann Crockett, one of the contracted wedding planners for Andrée Collective, recently graduated from Temple University’s hospitality degree program. She has worked across the event sphere from corporate events to auto shows to catering. “Weddings are a beast,” she said, “because they’re emotional. Events in general are emotional because they’re involving people.”
Weddings also represent the optimal intersection of project management and people skills. In addition to basic professional skills such as goal setting, resumé writing, and email drafting, apprentices learn how to navigate multiple details and timelines while maintaining grace under pressure to serve the bride and groom to the best of their ability. Graduates come away from the apprenticeship not only with transferable skills, but with actual experience to list on their resumés.
For her first wedding as an apprentice, Reese couldn’t help but approach it as she did most things: hopeful, but guarded. The flow of a traditional wedding was foreign to her, and she had forgotten what it was like to be in a standard workplace. Focusing so hard on day-to-day survival meant missing out on the young adult’s ritual celebrations like bachelorette parties and baby showers. And yet, Reese found bravery within herself to walk confidently into her first wedding and all the following ones, distinguished in her formal event attire and black Jordan 1s.
This mission of Andrée Collective usually prompts a few different reactions. Most people find Sam’s brainchild incredibly innovative. But it is not abnormal to find those who are initially surprised or even confused about Andrée Collective’s model. Undoubtedly, there is an irony about using weddings as an exit route for relational abuse and assault survivors. The triggers seem obvious. For some of the women that Andrée Collective serves, marriage imprisoned them.
But for others, the triggers of a wedding hardly compare to those present in day-to-day life. The effects of partner and sexual violence ripple far beyond individual relationships and embed themselves deep into one’s self-conception. What Sam tends to see in her group trauma therapy participants is “a lack of trust in others, but specifically a lack of trust in themselves: can I trust my own judgment about another person?”
For most survivors, it’s not the concept of a wedding that is triggering—the devil is in the details. It’s the vibrating buzz of a cell phone that they are trained to answer immediately. It’s managing conflict between coworkers when they are used to yielding. It’s multitasking anything while vigilantly surveilling the corners in a large, open space, or making decisions on the fly when they have lost confidence in themselves and their good judgment.
Andrée Collective wants survivors to confront their triggers and work through them therapeutically. Andrée Collective integrates mental health into every aspect of their services, whether it is the therapist on-call for apprentices during wedding weekends or taking a hard pause in the middle of a workday—atypical allowances for an irregular office.
Upon visiting Andrée Collective’s East Falls office, I easily sensed it: there’s grace here. Barring the occasional shrieks of Sam’s two children, peace breathed through the rooms. The soothing jazz and brief swells of laughter coaxed a genuine sense of safety.
“We never say that we are ’empowering’ people,” Sam explains to me, “because we believe that you already have that power within you.” It’s just about finding the power to live out your empowerment, and the site of celebration—more than weddings specifically—is the obvious place for that work. “I think there’s something so beautiful about hospitality and about celebration that is so far removed from the life of trauma,” Sam said.
Initially, Ann said that her reaction to Andrée Collective’s focus on weddings as rehabilitation fell into the “confused” category. “I think what I’ve come to see is that it’s a beautiful way to be able to reframe.” But it’s not the couple at the altar that prompts Reese to reframe her idea of what love looks like—it’s her friendships with the women at Andrée Collective who didn’t give up on her and who patiently waited for trust to build. “Being friends provides a very healing experience,” said Sam. “You can learn just as much or more about trust, about vulnerability, about love from friendships.”
The care and friendship these women displayed made a lifelong impression on Reese. “I can’t even imagine not having them in my life,” she reflected.
Andrée Collective doesn’t embrace weddings so they can persuade their apprentices to desire the fairytale of marriage and romance. It is first and foremost a training ground for employment. A not-so-romantic reality is that more than one in three women have faced sexual violence in their lifetime—a severe and severely trivialized problem. Instead, they embrace weddings because they are inherently future-facing, and every act of Andrée Collective is to cultivate hope and lay the groundwork for a world where women are safe to pursue their dreams.
“I’m making art again. I have friends again.” Reese said. Knowing that she has safe places and a support system has allowed her to dream again and make plans for the future. She dreams of getting married. She dreams of being a professional artist, a goal towards which she is already making strides. Along with her continuing apprenticeship at Andrée Collective, she works at Mural Arts Philadelphia as an artist and, recently, an event planner, championing Andrée’s social enterprise model through her work with Color Me Back, a work program that hires individuals to design and paint murals throughout the city, intentionally paying them more than Philadelphia’s standard living wage.
These social enterprise organizations, which leverage an existing market for a social good, can be found throughout Philadelphia. The Monkey and the Elephant, a coffee shop in Brewerytown, employs folks who have aged out of the foster care program. Down North Pizza in Strawberry Mansion employs formerly incarcerated men and women, providing them with resources like reduced housing, transportation, and legal representation to help them return to their lives. These “go-deep-with-a-few” kind of programs, as Sam described them, are committed to sticking it out with people long-term and seeing firsthand the change they hope to inspire in individual lives.
They all know there is a distinction between a one-time act of service and love, and these organizations are in the business of love. Love comes as a result of prolonged care and sacrificial service. Though it can be given, it’s something we already have. It’s instinctive, innate, already flowing within us. Trauma may clog our arteries. But when survivors show up to group therapy or to assist in wedding planning, love is never their “something borrowed.” It’s not even their “something new.” Love is something that, through their miraculous courage and the power of women joining forces, they find once again.
The Woodlands 