Raising Our Voices
On June 15th, one hundred guests attended The Community Fund for Women & Girls' event Raising Our Voices: Supporting Advocacy to Leverage Impact. The event showcased the recent Fund-supported advocacy projects of The Diaper Bank and Mothers for Justice and brought to light issues that you don't hear about on the evening news.
The Diaper Bank (TDB) requested and received a second grant of $10,000 from the Community Fund for Women & Girls to continue the Basic Human Needs Policy Project. In this second phase of the project, a National Diaper Rights Awareness Day is being coordinated in all three primary diaper distribution sites in Connecticut as well as at a Legislative Breakfast in Washington, DC with supporting sites across the country, convening the largest Basic Human Needs event in the history of TDB. In 2010, during the first phase of the project, Basic Needs Policy Project convened a nationally heralded Diaper Rights Colloquium at Yale Law School, which included state and federal legislators, state and national advocacy organizations, experts in the fields of child health, researchers and public policy experts interested in issues related to basic needs. The initial Women & Girls grant enabled TDB to widely and effectively disseminate Basic Human Needs Policy Project documents and action points to those individuals and organizations best able to promote and implement the recommendations. Women and their children in Connecticut are the primary population impacted by this program, although the reach of the Basic Needs Policy Project extends to women nationwide through the growing awareness on the national stage of how meeting the basic needs of poor women and children impacts economic stability, health and other measurable outcomes.
Mothers for Justice, a grassroots advocacy group comprising women of color with low or no income, showed their documentary of the experiences of women receiving cash assistance from the federal government through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. “Living in a Broken System” intends to dispel the myth of the “welfare mother” and includes the voices of people most affected by the TANF program. The film has already been shown to the local and state Department of Social Services. It was introduced at the legislature by Representative Toni Walker, has been seen at the UCONN School of Social Work and will be used as a training tool for future social workers.
All of the 2011 grant recipients were announced at the event. In 15 years since its inception, the Fund has awarded over $500,000.
Helene Robbins, Chair of the Fund, closed the event by reminding guests that there are a myriad of ways to support women and girls: