Last week, Women With A Vision’s (WWAV) Deon Haywood joined New Orleans’ new Human Relations Commission, which will serve as the city’s human rights office. Haywood is a veteran human rights defender, having worked at the grassroots level for more than 30 years at the intersections of reproductive justice, economic justice, sex workers’ rights, HIV/AIDS, harm reduction, LGBTQ rights, anti-criminalization, and ending mass incarceration. In recognition of her leadership, Haywood served as a representative from the U.S. South to the 2013 Frontline Defender’s Dublin Platform; she has also testified before the United Nations.
The Human Relations Commission was launched to ensure that the views and experiences of all New Orleanians are included in decision-making, most especially when assessing the entrenched, systemic barriers to equity for our most vulnerable citizens. As an advisor to the Commission, Haywood will be working to keep the spotlight on the communities WWAV has long-served through her participation in two committees: “Human Rights and Equity” and “Outreach and Education.” “Human Rights and Equity” will be a space of truth-telling: continuing to gather stories around the everyday violence that the New Orleans’ most marginalized survive daily and to speak the solutions that they demand through their own experience. “Outreach and Education” provides a platform through which to ensure that the work of the Human Relations Commission is accountable to the communities whose human rights are consistently and persistently most violated in our city, including Black women, LGBTQ people, sex workers, people who use drugs, criminalized communities, low-and-no-income women, and people whose lives unfold at several of these intersections.
Haywood is grateful to the other named advisors for their longstanding leadership, and is looking forward to working with them to create innovative synergies among the city’s most pressing human rights issues. As a native New Orleanian, a black queer woman, an activist warrior, a mother and grandmother, and a breast cancer survivor, Haywood is ever guided by the late Audre Lorde’s insistence, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” She is excited to realize this intersectional vision in partnership with Mayor Cantrell and the Human Relations Commission.