We hope you and your families are staying safe and healthy. We are launching this first WMM Quarterly during a time of great global uncertainty. The COVID-19 crisis is straining our systems, challenging our communities, and testing our collective resolve. Like you, our team is working remotely and pivoting our plans for the year. Our focus is to creatively support our community by collecting and sharing helpful resources, virtually convening with leaders serving those most impacted, and by connecting with and listening to the needs our of members and partners.

The Opportunity
This unprecedented moment is exacerbating our anxieties, heightening our fears, and pulling at our hearts. It is also surfacing our shared humanity and our enduring capacity for hope. As this pandemic casts a long shadow over our communities, it is these latter attributes of caring that are piercing through and emboldening us to dream about shaping a future more equitable for all.

The most powerful social movements have emerged from moments of despair and collective anguish – periods that unify people in their desire for a better, more just future, and that fuel activism aimed at rooting out exposed injustices. The current crisis disproportionately impacts marginalized and vulnerable communities, especially women and girls. The very social contract that ties our society together is being threatened. Yet, instead of eroding our sense of connection, we find ourselves more bound and interconnected than ever. Shared experiences are clarifying in this way, and this newfound clarity will unearth solutions that enable real change.

Our Shared Responsibility
At Women Moving Millions, we recognize that what is needed today is different from what will be asked of us tomorrow. What is clear is that we have a shared responsibility to ensure that vulnerable communities impacted most by this crisis have the resources they need to recover. In the weeks and months ahead, decision-making tables will be set, and policies crafted. The solutions proposed at these tables and other forums must include the unique perspectives and lived experiences of women. How solutions are designed will determine how, who, and when communities recover. At this moment of unprecedented need, our current advocacy fight calls us to leverage our community’s collective strength, networks, and voice to ensure that the agenda for gender equality moves forward.

We cannot do this alone – we need all of you, united in shared and committed purpose.

Our Work
This year, we launched our strategic plan to increase our impact by 2025. We are focused on growing our community, driving additional resources to our collective ecosystem, and accelerating progress toward our vision of a gender equal world.

In the months ahead, we will report on our progress against this plan and our community response to this moment. We are focused on:

• Catalyzing additional resources to organizations that are benefitting women and girls
• Bringing our organizations together to learn in community as we push ahead for a gender equal world
• Leveraging our collective knowledge and networks to advance better models of change
• Sharing stories of leadership and change in support of our common vision
• Partnering to strengthen and amplify those changemakers on the frontlines

“Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world” invites Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses. We accept this invitation and hope you will join us, in collaboration, on this journey ahead.

In Solidarity,
Sarah & Mona

Sarah Haacke Byrd (Executive Director, WMM)  
S. Mona Sinha (Board Chair, WMM)

READ THE COMPLETE QUARTERLY HERE