Women's Program
The goal of the Women's Program is to strengthen the capacity of the AFSC to recognize and act through its programs to eliminate sexism, a root cause of violence. This includes efforts to eliminate racism, homophobia, and class oppression.
The Women's Program assists AFSC programs to incorporate feminist and anti-racist perspectives into all stages of program development. We are developing new tools, such as Feminist Impact Statements, to be used with new systems set up by the Board Program Committee. The program also emphasizes engagement with many parts of the global feminist movement, building a bridge between AFSC programs and a broad spectrum of these groups.
The program's constituency includes AFSC staff, committee members and program partners who seek ways to address gender oppression. The Women's Program also addresses questions of sexism and gender equity as they arise within AFSC's own policies and practices.
Current program emphases include: Women Poverty and Economic Power (WPEP), which combines education and action utilizing popular education and economic literacy workshops for low-income women, production of resource materials, and participation in like-minded networks, including the AFSC-wide network on economic literacy; and Women and Global Corporations Project (WGC), which assists AFSC to contribute feminist perspectives to efforts at building alternatives to corporate/military state power. WGC documents, exposes, and reports on corporate policies, practices and development schemes which especially exploit women. Migration/immigration is a major emphasis of WGC, particularly following up on the publication, Hear Our Voices. The Program will soon publish a resource list on issues of trade, debt and development.
Other Women's Program projects include work on lesbian/gay/bisexual issues, women's health and reproductive rights, and ongoing work on Feminists Against Militarism. Several strands of follow-up to AFSC participation in the UN Fourth World Conference on Women are being developed with the AFSC delegates and other non-governmental organizations.