CARA was founded in the summer of 1999 after the closure of Seattle Rape Relief (SRR), one of the oldest rape crisis centers in the country. (For news articles featuring the closure of SRR, check out News.) Committed to providing a community-based anti-rape organization for Seattle, former volunteers of SRR banded together to develop an entirely different kind of anti-rape project and together became CARA's founders.

The founders envisioned a community organizing approach to addressing rape. Community organizing would allow personal networks, neighborhoods, and populations to use their skills and resources for building communities that resist rape and abuse, support survivors, hold perpetrators accountable, and embrace safety and self-determination. Organizing strategies would be truly community-driven, allowing community members to determine the goals and values for the program that reflect their experiences and create strategies that respond to their needs.

Local community leaders, activists, social service and social justice organizations strongly supported the move to community organizing as a powerful approach to undermining sexual and domestic violence. The founders and their allies also recognized that many populations were marginalized from established resources for a variety of reasons related to oppression. For this reason, they decided to focus initially on three under-served communities: Black communities, people with disabilities, and young people.

In August 1999, these activists named themselves Communities Against Rape and Abuse or CARA. With generous support and funding from the City of Seattle Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention Office, CARA was able to hire staff in January 2000.