The Women’s Resource Center has launched a new initiative to encourage women’s civic engagement to advocate for policy progress on issues ranging from the gender pay gap to the child care crisis.
The nonpartisan initiative, called Elevating Women’s Voices, aims to increase women’s participation in politics and give them a greater role in addressing systemic challenges that affect them most, says Ashley Brown, president and CEO of the Women’s Resource Center.
To that end, the initiative offers a variety of support services, from helping women register to providing information on opportunities to volunteer, speak at government meetings and run for elected office.
A new website provides links to resources and will soon feature interviews with local female leaders sharing their views and strategies on important issues affecting women and their families.
“Elevating women’s voices is fundamental to addressing gender-based issues that may otherwise be overlooked,” Brown said. “Issues such as reproductive rights, child care, equal pay and violence against women are directly impacted by women’s civic participation and presence in decision-making positions.”
While the initiative only launched in June, the groundwork for it was laid about five years ago, added Brown, whose agency provides clients in Sarasota and Manatee counties with everything from wellness and mental health programs to career counseling, job guidance and financial and legal assistance.
Around this time five years ago, the Women’s Resource Center found that its clients’ economic mobility was being severely impacted by what it called the “welfare cliff” — the drastic cuts in child care benefits and other welfare payments following small increases in household income.
Since then, the center has worked with community partners on the welfare cliff to advocate for change at the state level. Two years later, in 2022, it led another push, this time related to the affordable housing crisis — when it partnered with community foundations to persuade the Sarasota County Commission to allocate $25 million of its federal pandemic aid to affordable housing initiatives.
Meanwhile, the center’s staff continued to observe how social problems, policies and outcomes – from child care to housing to reproductive rights – disproportionately harmed women and affected their financial well-being.
For example, recent reports on Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, Employed (ALICE) families show that about two-thirds of all households headed by single mothers in Sarasota and Manatee counties are either ALICE families or below the federal poverty line. This is true of only 39% of households headed by single fathers.
Yet the center found in a survey last year that, despite the direct impact of government policies on their lives, about 40 percent of its female clients were not registered to vote, Brown said.
“That’s when we began to ramp up our public policy work to bring our clients’ voices to legislators and county commissioners and to educate them on their decisions and their ultimate impact on individuals,” Brown said.
Since then, the Women’s Resource Center has been involved in other lobbying efforts to push for Amendment 4 on abortion rights ahead of the November election.
And this summer, the center’s representatives testified before the Sarasota County Commission against the county’s $510,000 cut in child care assistance for hundreds of local working-class and low-income families.
Brown plans to soon publish interviews with female elected officials on the new website, including Florida Rep. Fiona McFarland (Sarasota), a key child care advocate, and Bradenton City Councilwoman Lisa Gonzalez Moore, who served on the board of Legal Aid of Manasota, which was also hit by massive cuts by the Sarasota County Commission.
With this bipartisan initiative, Brown hopes to break the political divide of recent years and provide women with easy and engaging ways to learn and become more involved in their community and state.
Ultimately, women’s voices will inform elected officials, Brown added, and in turn, women and their families will see the difference.
“We want to change the data on women and their families in our community,” she said, “and get stronger and bigger numbers in the column of people who are fully financially secure.”
This story is a collaboration between the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County. Saundra Amrhein covers the Season of Sharing campaign and issues related to housing, utilities, child care and transportation in the region. Reach her at [email protected].
