“As immigrants, we sometimes feel like we don’t have power.”
“But the Women’s Policy Institute showed us otherwise. We learned how to pass an important bill and we gained power in the process. We learned that we, too, can decide what kinds of laws we want to see in our state,” said Claudia Reyes.
Claudia is a domestic worker organizer, graduate of our Women’s Policy Institute and one of our heroes. When she was younger, she immigrated to United States with her family and for years has been working for our grant partner, Mujeres Unidas y Activas.
This small but powerful organization has been working on passing the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights for years and they succeeded last year. Now 100,000 California domestic workers can earn overtime pay, a right they had been denied for decades.
Just thinking about Claudia and her team of domestic worker advocates—their passion, perseverance in face of challenges and losses, their hard work and grit—makes me emotional.
These five women lobbied, advocated, testified, negotiated, protested, organized and built coalitions for years before they finally succeeded in winning equal labor rights for domestic workers. We take pride in knowing that our Women’s Policy Institute helped train these women and gave them the skills and the resources they needed to make this great victory possible.
“I think it’s important that women take leadership in public policy because, as women, we don’t think as individuals. We think as a family, as a community. The Women’s Policy Institute is like that: When I attended, we were five teams of five women working on different legislation…but we always worked together, always helped each other. We were a family, a community. I really value that experience.”
This #GivingTuesday you can help us add four more women to our Women’s Policy Institute community. It takes $15,000 to put one fellow through our year-long program.