Supporting Women & Girls of Color to Innovate

Thirty years ago, a group of concerned African-American women in New Orleans joined together in response to the growing spread of HIV/AIDS in communities of color. They formed a collective, aptly naming it Women With A Vision (WWAV). Their day jobs were in social work and case management in different agencies throughout the city. But in the afternoons, these visionary women went to work in Black communities contending with HIV. They were alarmed that nobody was doing anything about this affected population that had been rendered as good as invisible when it came to services. From its earliest days, Women With A Vision’s grassroots work has incorporated health education, advocacy, supportive services, and community-based participatory research. 

Today, WWAV is a trusted and beloved community organization, regarded as New Orleans’ premier women’s health and wellness policy organization. It is one of the very few organizations in politically conservative Louisiana working with women engaged in sex work and survival sex that is advocating for the HIV epidemic to be addressed through a gender-based lens. Women With A Vision stands apart, too, as an organization that is talking about criminalization, incarceration and criminal justice reform through a gender lens.

Executive Director of WWAV, Deon Haywood, was recently recognized as a Women with a Vision honoree at the Ms. Foundation for Women’s annual Gloria Awards Gala on May 8, 2019. In a conversation after the ceremony, Haywood recalled the inaugural years of WWAV: “We started our day at 4 p.m. and worked evenings on outreach. We worked in the field because our constituents were only available in the evening in community. We purchased a mobile unit a few years later so that we could do testing on the street—the work took place on the streets. We ran an underground syringe.” 

Haywood’s relationship with WWAV stretches way back to when she was a nineteen-year old volunteer with the collective. In 2006, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she assumed the position of Executive Director. “Someone had to take charge,” she states. It was a time of great uncertainly when there was no guarantee that a small grassroots nonprofit could rebuild and recover from the devastation. Haywood has remained steadfast to the organization’s mission to improve the lives of marginalized women, their families, and communities by addressing the social conditions that hinder their health and well-being.

“Women With A Vision is not just a place to get a job. It is critical to be invested in Black women, freedom, justice, and equality. If those are not in your heart, then you won’t make it at WWAV. You can’t be in this space and be all about yourself. It’s not our culture.”

The fruits of her devotion to the organization mean that thirty years since its founding, Haywood and her team at WWAV can celebrate “the amazing work and history of what it means for Black women to live in the vision of the possibilities of who we are,” she says with satisfaction and pride.

In 2016, the Ms. Foundation partnered with Women With A Vision, Inc., awarding a multi-year grant of $35,000 which enabled the launch of Young Women With A Vision (YWWAV)— a pilot afterschool program for teenage Black girls in New Orleans rooted in leadership development. The weekly program promotes sisterhood among Black women and girls using a social justice and reproductive justice lens, and specifically explores experiences unique to the cohort such as criminalization, trauma and disconnection from their families and communities.

 “Women With A Vision was one of our first grantees in our new Safety Portfolio,” says Teresa Younger, President and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women. “They are really responding and listening to the community. They are an organization led for and by women of color and are entrepreneurial and innovative in the approach that they take. In a place like New Orleans that’s seen ever-evolving challenges to growth, they are a constant voice and support for those most impacted.”

In New Orleans and across the Deep South, Black women and girls face many barriers to accessing adequate social services. Each year, as increasingly conservative legislative and social policies are pushed forward, the issues affecting Black women and girls are further exacerbated. Significant among these is the surge of conservative activism targeting abortion rights and funding for sexual health programming. The region’s legacies of racism and exploitation have created a health crisis for low-income Black women and girls who have fewer health education outreach directed at them.

At a time when criminalization is increasingly being used as a way to limit reproductive autonomy, WWAV’s core guiding principle serves as a beacon of light—people should not be criminalized for what they do with their own bodies and should have true decision-making power when it comes to their own health.

The community-based organization’s policy and advocacy efforts to challenge the criminalization of sex work under Louisiana’s “Crime Against Nature” statute has significantly shifted conversations at the city, state and national levels around the draconian laws targeting low-income and transgender women of color. Before WWAV’s relentless advocacy changed the statute, this law placed sex workers at increased risk of HIV infections and cut them off from services by adding them to the sex offender registry. WWAV’s efforts secured the removal of more than 800 cisgender and transgender women from Louisiana’s sex-offender registry.

Women With A Vision has successfully opposed, too, the passage of the “Dancer Bill” which intended to raise the legal age for dancers to 21—disastrous from an economic standpoint for young parents who support their families through these jobs. The organization’s legislative wins include the passage of a Good Sam bill to ensure substance abusers can call for help in an overdose situation and, significantly, in 2018, the passage of the Incarcerated Women’s Dignity Bill which deals with some of the tangible issues that women confront in prisons in Louisiana—accessing feminine hygiene products to truly participating in all of the activities available in prisons which having to endure a male pat down precluded.

WWAV is undertaking incredibly transformative work amid great social and political challenges in restrictive and conservative Louisiana, offering case management services, organizing, and integrating voter engagement and reproductive justice work in their framework. WWAV’s success has largely been enabled by their commitment to a high impact service and advocacy model for community mobilization. They treat immediate survival and systemic change as interdependent goals.

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On May 8, 2019 at the Gloria Awards, Deon Haywood expressed her gratitude before a riveted audience after she was presented with the Women of Vison award by Gloria Steinem, founding mother of the Ms. Foundation for Women. “I want this to be celebratory,” Haywood said, explaining that “the hard stuff” is what she and her team talk about and work on every single day. In fact, whilst in New York, she’d been receiving texts from her staff in Louisiana who were fighting the six-week abortion ban. Haywood said she wished this celebratory moment to be about what it means to “see each other, to hold one another, what it means to trust Black women… to trust Black women who are born and raised in the South.”

She shared a pivotal moment in her life that profoundly impacted her sense of self and molded her career path. When Haywood was 19 years old, she had the opportunity to spend some time at the office of the National Council of Negro Women of New Orleans. At the end of the week, to her great surprise she was invited to meet with the Executive Director, Emma Bromon. Awed by the charismatic and “bold” leader, the young Haywood knew immediately that this was the kind of Black woman she wanted to become. “I see you, too,” Bromen said to her and offered her a job. It was Haywood’s first organizing job.

Haywood described the moment as “historic,” conveying just how significant and important it was for a young Black girl from New Orleans who was still figuring out who she was and where she was going to be seen by the leader of The National Council of Negro Women. In her remarks, she paid homage to another mentor and friend, Dr. Francis Berry who had recently said to her, “You are standing in your power. You are leading like I knew you would. You are giving young Black women, young queer Black women an example to lead from.” Haywood emphasized to the audience, “It’s only because someone saw me,” highlighting how impactful it can be to recognize and cheer on someone when they’re doing good work.

With the launch of Young Women With A Vision in 2016, Deon Haywood is actively sharing and passing on the gift of mentorship that dramatically transformed her own life. Young Women With a Vision offers a safe space for Black girls and young women of color, many of whom for the first time in their lives, are being seen, supported, affirmed and recognized within a nurturing community.

 As the longest standing national public women’s foundation in the country, the Ms. Foundation for Women has been advancing women’s grassroots solutions in the face of extraordinary challenges in reproductive health, safety, and economic security for women. Investing in and building partnership with Women With A Vision goes to the very heart of the foundation’s mission to strengthen the capacity of women-led movements that are mobilizing meaningful social, cultural and economic change in women’s lives.

The Ms. Foundation recognizes and honors women leaders and women-led community organizations that are at the vanguard of impactful grassroots movements in the United States— especially so in our present time when conservative forces are dismantling hard-fought gains that have taken decades to achieve. Through the implementation of its integrated five-year strategic plan, the Ms. Foundation for Women has committed to amplifying its voice as a national leader, along with that of grantee partners, in the fight for gender equity.

“Women With A Vision fits well within our strategic plan,” says Teresa Younger. “It’s an organization led for and by women of color. We are honored and privileged to be in partnership with them and to learn from them how to do the work that’s needed in the South which is part of our strategic plan.”

The Ms. Foundation’s investment in and partnership with WWAV is a dynamic step towards reaching the desired goal of racial and gender equity in the United States. WWAV’s vision, impact, creativity and activism underscore the values of the foundation’s strategic plan. Designed to achieve maximum social impact— under the central theme of building power, advancing democracy— the six-prong strategic approach includes scaling up grantmaking, increasing capacity building, ramping up policy and advocacy strategies, enhancing strategic communications, building greater collective impact and political power.

The Ms. Foundation has continued to provide multi-year flexible grants to Women With A Vision, which has enabled the organization to expand its impact on the younger generation of Black girls in the South in the areas of health and safety. Investing in the South, creating greater impact in the region and mobilizing against the regressive policies there that are hurting women are actions integrally aligned with the Ms. Foundation’s five-year strategic plan.

“I really admire Women with a Vision, their tenacity and commitment to the community they serve which is primarily women of color, particularly Black women, center queer, LBT, cisgender and transgender women in New Orleans,” says Ejim Dike, Senior Strategist at the Ms. Foundation for Women who works on the Safety portfolio. “WWAV works to preserve the dignity and bodily integrity of women who are criminalized just for their existence. They organize and conduct skills-building workshops and are fierce advocates. They provide a healing safe space for learning and direct services by showing up in court, offering recovery support and occupational skills. From the beginning, they’ve had a model that is informed by their work in their community. They offer all the support to their members but then they trust their members to do the work. Like so many of our grantee partners, they are doing amazing ‘love work!’”

Links:

• Women With A Vision