Dear friends,
Happy New Year from the Women’s Fund SouthCoast! We are excited to announce several new initiatives that we are implementing in 2024. As we plan for growth, we moved our office from 65 William St. to a much larger space at 628 Pleasant St. Suite 322 in New Bedford. We will miss our storefront presence in the community, but are excited about forging new partnerships with existing organizations to bring gender justice education to AHA! Nights and beyond. We welcome all to stop by to say hello.
This past year I worked with many young women leading campaigns to end period poverty, advancing city-wide policies for better youth outcomes, creating new women’s empowerment initiatives to fill in gaps and got to see some first-generation students get into college. If we don’t invest in equitable pipelines to leadership positions, then it will be difficult to see real progress. We also have to invest in the leadership development of adult women who become mentors, start new youth programs and sustain economic empowerment. All systems have to work together.
At our Annual Meeting at Our Sisters’ School last month we heard from an intergenerational panel of community leaders about how they were advancing gender and racial justice on the SouthCoast. At the close of the meeting, I made a very exciting announcement that we were selected to join The National Philanthropic Collaborative of Young Women’s Initiatives which is a dynamic effort by the nation’s leading women’s foundations that seeks to galvanize and invest resources to amplify the collective power of young women—particularly young women of color— to ensure that they are safe, healthy and economically prosperous in a world with gender and racial equity. I am thrilled to bring this initiative, originally stemming from the former White House Council on Women and Girls, to the SouthCoast. Stay tuned for more information in the coming month.
This year is full of new beginnings. I look forward to collaborating with all of you to continue moving the needle on gender and racial justice.
In community,
