Mission

The Women's Economic Agenda Project (WEAP) demands economic justice for poor women and their families. WEAP envisions a world in which all women and their families have the skills, shelter, and nourishment they need to enjoy happy, healthy, and productive lives. WEAP assists poor women to achieve a livable wage by providing technical training, emotional support, and linkage to resources. WEAP recognizes that the policies that affect the poorest of our sisters affect all people. WEAP works to change societal and governmental policies that relegate women to the bottom of the economic pyramid.

 
WEAP's Executive Director, Ethel Long-Scott, in Goa for the Women, Poverty, and Feminism International Conference.
Credit: Austin Long-Scott

WEAP's Vision and Work: Poverty Elimination and Just Health Care

WEAP believes that integral to women's rights is the meeting of everyone's basic economic human rights.  This is why WEAP has been a consistent presence and voice in the fight for the integrity of all Californians, with respect to their fundamental human rights to quality and affordable healthcare, food, housing, workers rights, etc.

WEAP is a unique organization in the Bay Area.  As hosts of the California Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, we have been at the forefront of the human rights movement as we protest, advocate, and raise the visibility of the role of poor and working people in crafting the real solutions to our future.  We have been rallying around the absolute right to healthcare explicitly since 1995.

WEAP is now a 25 year old social justice organization that brings to human rights work a deep and textured history, a knowledge of how to fight for our rights, a powerful vision of rights for the most destitute, and a plan on how to make this a reality.  We build leadership among low-income women in order to fight for our lives more effectively on an individual and societal basis. Over the years, we have made numerous advances on multiple fronts-locally, regionally, and nationally.  

This year has seen significant activity around healthcare. It has been WEAP's position from its inception that the best policy is a policy informed by an organized and cogent voice of the people most affected. Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums recently tapped WEAP to participate on an advisory commission to explore options for a universal healthcare program, like the one San Francisco has funded recently, for Alameda County's 170,000 uninsured, 80,000 of which live in Oakland.  Encouraged by this percolation of activity around healthcare, WEAP still remains clear that no matter what advances are made locally or legislatively, the struggle cannot end until the human right to healthcare is secured for everyone.  The amount of uninsured nationally is still rising: this year counted conservatively at 47 million. To truly reap the benefits of a universal healthcare system, a federal program is key.  In order to win this, as we struggle locally and regionally to make advances, we must build an educated, engaged, and powerful domestic human rights movement to not only win our rights back but to guarantee their sustenance in the long run.