This weekend marked the 2-year anniversary of the arson attack on our offices, and here at Women With a Vision we have found ourselves looking back to look forward, celebrating our victories, and remembering our struggles.
This past year at WWAV has been one of immense growth and healing, staff and supporters and allies joining together to find new vehicles to support the work and to grow the work in ways that honor our founding mothers’ visions and that respond to the evolving needs of our community.
The landscape of New Orleans and the South continues to change; policies are growing more conservative and restrictive, bringing a new set of challenges to the communities we stand beside — communities that already bear the scars of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, discrimination, systemic poverty, HIV/AIDS, and interpersonal and structural violence. At WWAV we organize at the margins, at the intersections, to change policy and to lift voice. We share the stories of women, LGBTQ communities, drug users, sex workers, mothers, and daughters, fighting for change and human rights.
In the coming months, we will continue to fight against the increased criminalization of poor women’s lives, we will continue to combine advocacy with service to better meet the needs of the most vulnerable, and we will continue to call out the structural forces that increase our communities’ risk and vulnerability to violence and disease.
We have said this time and time before, but we still feel we don’t say it often enough: we’ve survived this long because of you. After the fire, it was you — our local, national, and international community of supporters — that held us up: you threw fundraisers to help us purchase a new property, you offered time and space and advice, and you have given us the support that has allowed us to continue to do the work we’ve done for a quarter of a century. During the past two years we have built new connections, we have grown our advocacy and analysis, and we have shared our story across the globe.
Let’s continue to stand together, moving ever forward towards liberation.