Dear friends of MCDW,
We hope you have enjoyed Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve, and any other meaningful winter traditions, rooted in faith, family, community, or personal to you. As we enter the new year, we are dreaming of justice, respect and dignity for all domestic workers in Massachusetts.
In 2022, MCDW built structures, teams, and programs to create a path towards worker leadership. We solidified a consistent, committed domestic worker leadership team that meets every week to run all of our community-facing programming, connect with movement building across the state, and do outreach to other domestic workers. MCDW worker leaders participated in a weekly free food distribution program with the East Boston Mutual Aid Network and supported critical campaigns in MA for justice, dignity, and respect for all immigrant workers, including the bill for drivers licenses for undocumented people, which is now officially state legislation and will go into effect this year!
We held monthly virtual seminars for domestic workers on their rights under MA law and how to fight against workplace abuses. This winter, MCDW launched a pilot Leadership Development program in Spanish and Portuguese for 10 domestic worker leaders across Massachusetts. Together we studied the Massachusetts Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the history of domestic worker organizing in the US over the last 300 years, and examined leadership as a means to build community power!
In 2023, we hope to continue on our path to worker-led organizing and collective advocacy. One piece of this goal is to raise $5000 in January to support the essential peer-to-peer outreach of Worker Leaders. These four amazing women have honed leadership skills and key connections to the rest of the organizing scene in Boston. Meeting our fundraising goal will enable them to share knowledge and resources on the protected rights of domestic workers and invite other workers to become MCDW members, increasing involvement in the movement.
|
