Why SADIA exists
"You never forget the moment you realize no one is coming."
— Arbaina Kawilan, TEDx Talk: Safety is an Inside Job (2025)
For me, that moment was in a shelter in Austin, Texas. 9,000 miles from home, with nothing but a flip phone and a bag of clothes.
Home is Cotabato City, a dense and often overlooked part of the southern Philippines. My grandmother raised me after my mother left when I was two weeks old to work abroad. Where I came from, most girls did not grow up dreaming big. They grew up preparing to leave. To Saudi Arabia, to Hong Kong. To work as domestic help for other families. But I wanted something different. Not just for me, but for my children. Children I hadn't even met yet.
In 2016, I came to the United States on a work and travel visa. In 2018, I walked through that door for good. I moved to Myrtle Beach, then Austin. And it was in Austin that I met my husband. He was kind, funny, and supportive of my dreams in a way that felt rare. We married in August 2020, in the height of the pandemic.
What felt like stability slowly revealed itself as something else. Because it wasn't safe. At first it was emotional. The kind of harm that hides behind raised voices and subtle control. But eventually it turned physical. I wasn't just unhappy. I was trapped.
Here is what most people don't know: when an immigrant woman marries an American citizen, her legal status is often tied to that relationship. Leaving doesn't just risk heartbreak. It risks deportation, poverty, separation from your children, losing everything. Immigrant women experience domestic violence at rates similar to American women, but report it far less. Nearly 80% are afraid to go to the police. Because when your visa is tied to the person hurting you, where do you go?
On February 23, 2022, I left. I had no job, no phone except the one the police gave me, and no legal certainty. What I did have was a choice: to let all of that fear define me, or to transmute it into something else.
SAFE Austin gave me shelter. I am grateful for that. What followed was months of navigating systems that were never designed to work together: legal aid, immigration filings, housing applications, Medicaid, SNAP, work authorization. Each one its own separate process, its own office, its own language. The resources existed. They were just scattered. And I was the one responsible for holding the map, coordinating the pieces, telling my story again and again to rooms full of strangers, while also just trying to survive.
I taught myself immigration law. I discovered VAWA, the Violence Against Women Act, which supports immigrant women in situations like mine. I found a lawyer. I applied for protection. Within two months, I had secured conditional legal status. I found work at a hotel nearby. I had noticed they employed immigrants, and they connected me with an agency they worked with. I kept climbing, one small win at a time.
Because when your world has been shattered, it is not the big gestures that save you. It is the phone that was suddenly half off when you couldn't afford it. It is the shelter bed. It is every yes that follows a hundred silent nos. Those moments, stacked gently, become a staircase.
SADIA was born from that staircase, and from the question I kept asking myself: why did I have to build it alone? Why did navigating a crisis require me to also become my own case manager, my own legal researcher, my own advocate at every door?
The answer is that no coordination layer existed. No single place that held all the pieces, tracked the progress, and walked beside a woman through the entire journey — from the night everything was gone to the day she stood on her own again.
That is what SADIA is.
And then there is my grandmother, the woman this platform is named after. She raised me in the rainstorms of the southern Philippines. She found food when there was none and made it feel like enough. She forced me to show up to life even when I didn't want to. She was the one place I could always go. She held everything together when I could not.
She passed away before I ever became an immigrant. But she is the reason I knew what it felt like to have one safe place to go. SADIA is named after her because that is what this platform is trying to be: the one place, the warm embrace, the coordination that should have always existed.
I still remember that little girl in the Philippines. The one who was expected to leave, to serve, to sacrifice. I think she would be proud. Not because everything turned out perfectly, but because I never stopped choosing to hope.
I am building SADIA so that the woman who finds this site at 2 in the morning — scared, starting over, unsure if she can do this — feels embraced the moment she lands here. So that she never has to realize, the way I did, that no one is coming.
Because sometimes that moment — the one where you realize you are on your own — is the moment you start becoming who you needed all along.
SADIA exists so that moment never has to come alone.
— Arbaina Kawilan
Founder, SADIA