Again I am grateful that Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday falls in the beginning of each new year so that we will not be disheartened for the work ahead.

Nearly a year ago, in response to the inauguration of one of the most vile men elected to any office, women along with men from all over this country marched to defend the dignity and common decency that our democracy should embody.

We must not be disheartened in our fight for the right to health care, when Baltimore security men were allowed to push a sick woman in her hospital wrap, unable to afford the medical attention she needed, out the door onto frozen concrete late at night.  As women, we must not be disheartened in our fight for decency when many other women vote for a political party who would be represented by a child molester.  These things are not America’s destiny. 
 
Instead, we are inspired by black women who organized with complete abandon to defeat that political party in Alabama.  Many of those women learned to do it decades ago walking with Martin Luther King who taught: “We need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent…” The rest of us will not be disheartened, because we will follow the black women of Alabama.  They organized and they won. This is America’s destiny.

Women march again this January 20th in the midst of a flurry from white men crying “I didn’t hear that.”  “Not those words.”  We will walk in the cold and we will not be disheartened.  We will carry Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham jail in response to a public statement of concern issued by eight white religious leaders. He wrote “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

2018 will be another marching year.  It is the year we start crawling out of the hole that the Republican Party dug for us.  We will stand up for the Dreamers.  We will organize like the black women in Alabama and the like the brave first-time candidates who got elected to the Virginia Legislature. We will organize like Fannie Lou Hamer who desegregated the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964.  We will march for every woman who has been sexually abused and harassed and called out “Me Too!” Like women of the Old Window Workshop Cooperative we will fight to keep our safe work place and to own our own labor.  We will fight for health care as a human right and WE WILL VOTE. 

This year Springfield Women Organize will march on International Women’s Day.  Go to the Facebook group to stay informed and join us.

​With gratitude for Martin Luther King Jr. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

Can you participate to help organize the Springfield Day Without Women March, a march for for women’s lives on March 8th, International Women's Day?  

Our first Organizer's meeting is Thursday, March 2nd, 11:00 AM at 806 Main St. Springfield (office of South End C-3 Community Center)

If each of us could help:

• Spread the word - DOWNLOAD Flyer  (post wherever you can)
• Provide cardboard and markers to help women make signs of things they want to say
• Be a Speaker about how we can protect ourselves, girls, people of color and Muslims and Jews and immigrants and our health and our water and our trees and gardens or what we need right now in our neighborhoods
• Lead the march with songs and drumming
• Sing or play music at the pre-march rally
• Provide a loud speaker system
• Serve as peacekeepers and safety guides—maybe wear white shirts or scarves.  This group should meet before the march.
• Take steps to make sure the march on March 8th is a good experience for women and children learning to speak out.

Join and SHARE our Facebook Event and please invite your friends.

The event will be 3:00 - 6:00 PM, giving us time for speakers, music and marching. Tell us your thoughts. Thanks so much.
In Solidarity with All Women, in Springfield and everywhere across the world.

​Every year, I am grateful that Martin Luther King’s birthday is in January because it provides new resolve for our essential cause of social justice.  This year we need to start with his inspiration more than most other Januarys: 

With the unassured future of our democracy everything we do in our own communities is important now.  In poor neighborhoods, we have a greater urgency for sources of strength to rebuild hope. Women and people of color must stand up now and not sit back down again until we know that our children will not be molested or shot at, our water will always be drinkable and we are truly free to be dignified.  We must find the thing that hurts the person standing next to us and ask them, “How can I ease your pain?”

We must fight for each other’s dignity as well as our own.  Injustice prescribes women’s roles to labor in the “service sector” only.  We must open the windows of light from all directions so that school girls who imagine themselves flying planes or running countries can take a hand up from women before them.   

This year demands a goal beyond the complacency of living wage jobs “granted” by stock holders in company boardrooms.  We must strive to bring more women into our vision of owning the businesses that produce our jobs. The women’s cooperative of the Old Window Workshop welcomes you to join us!  

Just as women from all over the world took the survival of democracy into our own hands on Saturday, the 21st, we will ORGANIZE and MARCH ON!

With your eyes open every one of us can recognize that women are missing from corporation board rooms, on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and on construction sites.  In fact, where people are making the most money in our economy, women are an unusual sight. And every one who takes their child to day care or visits a nursing home can recognize that men are absent in these jobs.

Not just friends that I talk to, but strangers in the grocery line agree that our country is on the precipice of changing this basic inequality. A just economy is one which is more women-centered.  It is where our economic well-being is structured around the health and safety of families and neighborhoods. To be more women-centered is to create job opportunities that put families first and focus on the places we call home.

Springfield is one of the richest grounds for us to create more gender and racial economic equality. Women and people of color can grow this city by reusing Springfield’s wealth of raw materials and restoring our built environment. Restoring infrastructure, like water pipes, underground gas lines, transportation systems, healthy buildings and outdoor spaces is place-based work and is therefore accessible to women. 

This year, the U.S. Department of Labor began a full-out effort to build Registered Apprenticeship programs as a means for low-opportunity citizens to gain access to dignified, living-wage work. Massachusetts can help grow a more equitable workforce by engaging community colleges in utilizing existing resources through preservation, material reuse and environmental health and safety industries that are inherently more women-centered than exclusive high-tech and construction fields. From this ground, women can bridge the gap between family and equal work.  

Jenny Cavanaugh completed her Master’s Degree in Design and Historic Preservation at UMass by giving us her research and conclusions linking existing resources to women’s economic opportunity.  Her Capstone Project featured OWW to illustrate the connection between women in the trades and Springfield’s legacy of buildings which sheltered and grew generations of the city’s workforce. Read her study. She calls upon STCC and DCAMM to open possibilities with resources already in hand.

Four women stood in the dim parking lot of the After-Incarceration Support Services program on a bitter-cold Wednesday night sharing a cigarette. I made my way past them inside where I headed toward the sound of laughter and loud voices. Women were gathering in a big room at the end of a hall. I walked in to a room with many tables surrounded by chairs in the center and chairs along the walls which began to fill. Some women seemed to be young while others seemed older, although not nearly my age. It wasn’t apparent if there were more white or black or Latina women. It wasn’t apparent if they knew each other before this night. What was clear to me is that they were all invested in being there.

I came to talk about careers for women in construction trades. My paid part-time job since July has been to direct a building trades pre-apprenticeship program called Community Works. Gradually, the room filled to capacity. I guessed there were more than 30 women present. I wrote a statement on a blank page of an easel that I found in the corner of the room. “Women deserve good pay for their work.” My thought was that everyone in the room could identify with that, even if they hadn’t thought about a career in construction.

When I asked how many women had experience in the trades or even doing home repairs, there was great commotion with many hands up and several women talking at once about what they’ve done—some joking about themselves, others dead serious. One woman is a self-employed painter. “Not enough work, though,” she said. Another woman mixed concrete all last summer. After giving a brief introduction to Community Works, I asked how many women in the room had a GED or high school diploma. Less than a third of the women raised their hands. I asked how many had a driver’s license. Only seven women raised their hands. A young woman proudly raised her hand for the GED but her face fell at the second question. I saw a few heads nod when she told me that she had to pay $1,500 in fines and didn’t see how that was going to happen with no job.

Without a high school diploma, the chances of women getting a living-wage job are nil. Without some money to start with, the chances are few that women will go back to school while they care for children or old relatives and everybody they know lives in distressed neighborhoods with no place to park a car even if they could afford one. At least there is a gathering every Wednesday night at AISS where women have hope that their futures will be better than their past.

Just how is this going to happen? How are their futures going to be any better? Incarceration for women is a predictive outcome of poverty and, or sexual violence.

The immediate and solvable problem is poverty. Poverty is solved with dignified work for decent pay. The solution and the money to pay for the work, is within walking distance of the room at AISS. Preserving and maintaining historic buildings and parks creates long-term, skill-building jobs for the people who need them most. Every window restored is a week’s food for a family and then is something beautiful for generations. I will carry the hope of these women as their scout to open the road that runs between city hall and real jobs.