The Women's Economic Agenda Project (WEAP) is committed to attaining economic human rights for all people. In a land of abundance, there is no reason anyone's basic human needs should not be met. WEAP is diligently working to organize the poor, low-income workers, and unemployed into a movement to achieve a vision of a world without poverty and despair, a world that Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of in his Poor People's Campaign of 1968.
Wall Street's banditry was the proximate cause of the Great Recession, not its underlying cause. Even if the Street is better controlled in the future (and I have my doubts), the structural reason for the Great Recession still haunts America. That reason is America's surging inequality. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.
I work with Survivors Inc, an antipoverty organization in Massachusetts; I am a volunteer coordinator and Editor of our newspaper Survival News. I work with Mass Welfare Rights Union and the National Welfare Rights Union. We advocate for low income women and their families for an adequate standard of living. I also work with the Poverty Working Group of the USSF. Our goals at the USSF were to participate in the workshops and to meet like minded folks to network, strategize and organize a plan to raise welfare benefits above the poverty level and to find a way to enact the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
If I had to pick one word for Americans who want real change, it would be independence. Not only because the United States was founded on the idea of independence but because those of us who work to try and change the country for the better and have studied American history have learned this has always been the critical ingredient for real change. First, we need independent media. Web based outlets like this one are a critical ingredient to the success of advocacy efforts. Like so many businesses in the United States, the media is controlled by concentrated group of corporations. A handful of companies own all the hundreds of television stations on your cable TV.
"We, the poor, jobless, downsized, uninsured victims of welfare reform and others abused by the institutions of domination are no longer silent. We are moving forward with the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many freedom fighters to improve the lives of Americans."
-Portia Anderson, WEAP
Upcoming Events
| 09/15/10 | Teach-In Save The Date! |
| 09/24/10 | SAVE's 8th Annual Breakfast Eye Opener |
| 09/30/11 | World Courts of Women on Poverty in the US |