Our Racial Justice Journey
The Maine Women’s Lobby was founded in 1978 by a group of Mainers who recognized that some members of our community had greater access to opportunity and justice than others, and they made a commitment to change the underlying systems and structures that uphold that inequity. Dismantling oppression is in our DNA, and we are joining our community in standing up for the rights, dignity, and humanity of Black people. Black lives matter. As surely as systemic racism has led to Black Mainers being ten times more likely to get COVID-19, systemic state-sanctioned violence has meant that Black people are twice as likely to die at the hands of police than white people nationally.
This must end.
While we at the Lobby have always brought a gender lens to our public policy efforts, we recognize that our organizations (the Lobby and the Education Fund) have had overwhelmingly white leadership and served a white community. In recent years, we have worked mightily to correct our racial lens and to center the experiences and voices of those most affected by harmful public policy: primarily Black and Indigenous women, people of color, queer and trans people, poor people, and others whose experiences mean they are systematically excluded from the opportunities that others enjoy.
As we work to transform our organizations in this way, we have made and are making many changes, including:
A complete overhaul to our personnel policies and hiring practices was conducted in the spring of 2020, and other artifacts of the organizations such as bylaws are being updated to put our values of equity and justice at the center. Just as a budget is a moral document, organizational budgets and policies reflect our foundational beliefs;
Plans to substantially shift our Board of Directors recruitment and selection process in the summer of 2020 in order to build a leadership that is representative of the communities we seek to support and serve;
Building programming and policy priorities that center our commitment to dismantling misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and colonialist power structures (such as a community reading group which grapples with the connections between gender, race, and policy);
Partnership practices that echo our feminist roots of collaboration and a community of care. We aim to lead and follow from a place of abundance. We are actively engaging partner community-based organizations and asking where and how we can best support their efforts;
Updating our biennial Policy Roadmap with disaggregated Maine-based data where possible. Disaggregated data (which reflects subpopulations) more accurately illustrate the people, communities, and regions who are disproportionately harmed by systems and policies. We are increasing our data-driven priority setting in our policy work, and intend to actively support data-driven decision making within state and local systems (such as advocating for including race and ethnicity in the state’s prosecutorial database, which reflects crime charges and convictions);
Ongoing Board and staff education and discussion, including monthly readings and personal and organizational reflections; and
In every step aiming to use our privilege and platforms to amplify the voices and needs of those who have been treated with indignity and denied their humanity – and to change the underlying systems which perpetuate oppression.
Still, we know this is just the beginning of transformative work. Still, we know we will get it wrong again and again. We commit to being accountable and to doing the work of anti-racism and anti-misogyny both as individual staff and Board members and on an organizational level. That means accepting that we will fumble as we work to grow. We continue to try to balance the need to be transparent and accountable with the need to amplify others’ voices rather than our own – as well as acknowledging the potential of engaging in performative work (efforts made to ‘look’ like a good ally without changing underlying structures of racism and misogyny). We are choosing to make this statement public not to congratulate ourselves, but to be transparent about our goals and to invite community accountability.
We are listening to our community, and working to build a more expansive, more inclusive community. We look forward to walking alongside our founders, partners, and community members as we all work to undo the harm that has been caused by white supremacy and white-centric power structures in Maine and elsewhere – including those we may have participated in – and to build toward a more just future for us all.
In solidarity,
Maine Women’s Lobby & MWL Education Fund
