INTRODUCTION: Congratulations, you’ve finished the 21 Day Challenge! Thank you for participating and making this experience so enriching. We hope you learned something new and deepened your commitment to dismantling racism wherever it shows up in your daily life. Although this session of the Challenge has come to an end, the conversation continues and the work is not over! As we see markers like current unemployment numbers and COVID-19 illness and fatalities on the rise, especially among women in Black and brown communities, we ask you to continue this habit-building series with an additional set of resources to close this session of the challenge. It’s widely known that we are in a recession but why is this one different?

WE CHALLENGE YOU TO…

15 mins

Read our op-ed published recently in the Asheville Citizen-Times. Our nation is experiencing the onset of our first female-led recession– more appropriately, a “Shecession”– which was fueled by disappearing service-sector jobs and a lack of child care options.

10 minsThe U.S. lost 140,000 jobs in December, but according to this CNN article, women accounted for all the job losses.

30 minsThe LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and YWCA USA partnered on a research paper entitled “America’s Recovery from the 2020 “Shecession”: Building a Female Future of Childcare and Work,” which details how challenges and systemic inequities are contributing to this economic crisis’ and the disproportionate impact on women. The white paper outlines how national and local policymakers have failed to identify women’s economic security concerns, despite overwhelming support among women, around key areas like childcare, equal pay, and fair workplaces. The authors of the report demonstrate the ways the country’s childcare system is failing parents, children, childcare workers, and the American economy, and raise serious concerns about a future of work that will automate women out of the workforce. 

What is the 21 Day Racial Equity & Social Justice Challenge?

Many people are becoming newly aware of how systemic racism and violence are impacting people of color. Even if you are new to the conversation, that is OK. Our 21 Day Challenge is designed to create dedicated time and space to build more effective social justice habits, particularly those dealing with issues of race, power, privilege, and leadership. Participants who sign up for the Challenge will receive daily tasks via email to help foster their understanding and awareness, with activities such as reading an article, listening to a podcast, or reflecting on personal experience. If you’ve already completed this challenge with us in the past please know that our challenge is designed to be taken multiple times by selecting different daily challenges in order to expand what you have previously learned. Follow this link for the resources.

DID YOU KNOW

Only about 9 percent of grant-making from foundations goes into communities of color?

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