Big Changes and New Partnership for Women, Money & Democracy Committee

Graphic by Caitlin Barnes Design.

By Marybeth Gardam
Chair, Women, Money & Democracy Issue Committee

March 2020

The Corporations v Democracy Issue Committee of WILPF US has changed its name and expanded its imperative. The renamed Women, Money & Democracy Committee (W$D) recently formalized a partnership with a new nonprofit, An Economy of Our Own. So what’s with all the changes?

After a respite, the committee was relaunched in 2019 and new members joined some of the original members with a slightly expanded directive. “It’s clearer than ever that our economy is broken and the disparity between the 1% and the rest of us is growing,” explains Committee Chair Marybeth Gardam. “Women and families bear the biggest part of the burden as we try to balance careers, child-rearing, higher education, and keeping body and soul together and in tune with the universe. So the new committee is prioritizing the damaging effects on women of this rigged winner-take-all economy. It simply doesn’t work for most of us.” Hence the name change.  

“We still feel that corporate power is a huge factor in degrading democracy, especially with the corruption and influence-peddling in DC and at the state level. It’s reached epidemic proportions. Challenging corporate power will always be a focus for us,” Gardam explained. “But we’ve increasingly realized that challenging corporate power is just one tool that can work. We’re trying to come at this from several directions.”

The new committee has prioritized the following areas for its work in the next 2-3 years:

1. Supporting Public Banking initiatives across the US. Public banks nurture local investment and allow communities to decide what they want to support with their dollars. That can really help to support many of WILPF’s values: worker rights, climate and green sustainable energy solutions, education, healthcare, homelessness solutions, childcare, etc.
2. Creating a Feminist Economic Toolkit that educates and lifts up women who are working to find economic justice solutions to our rigged winner-take-all economy. When completed, it will include books, films, podcasts, and articles that can help explain what’s wrong with the US monetary system and how it got this way.
3. A Debt Fuels War/War Fuels Debt project centers on an understanding of how the obscene expenses of waging endless war creates debt that steals the future from American families and young people. Debt is also tied to war funding. It creates ongoing financial stress that promotes greed, a lack of empathy, and a devaluing of human worth that makes war almost inevitable. This is a project that connects to the DISARM/End Wars Committee of WILPF US.
4. Pro-Democracy Work continues to guide the committee and encompasses our work to support  a constitutional amendment to insist that corporations are not people and should not have the constitutional rights guaranteed for people, and that money is not speech. And members of the committee are also engaged with opposing gerrymandering, corruption, and voter suppression.
5. The new W$D continues its collaboration with the Earth Democracy Issue Committee’s Climate Justice+Women+Peace project that addresses the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground and recognize how climate crisis affects women and families, and how it creates climate refugees and resource conflicts that lead to war.
6. W$D members are studying the possible ways to redesign America’s monetary system towards a ‘caring economy’ and a new system not dependent on debt and Wall Street fraud, one that can work for all Americans.
7. Advocating for a Women’s Budget and participatory budgeting in the US is a long-term goal.  

WILPF US is represented on the Advisory Board of An Economy of Our Own, a new but impressive organization determined to lift up economic solutions and the women who do the heavy lifting. In collaboration with An Economy of Our Own, WILPF US will be represented by the W$D Committee at two national conferences in 2020. In early June they’ll attend and table at the New Young Feminist Leaders Conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by Ms. Magazine and the National Organization for Women. In late November they’ll attend and participate in the Economics, Justice, and the Climate Crisis conference in Sonoma, CA, sponsored by Praxis Peace Institute.

If WILPF members in these regions are interested in attending either of these conferences to help staff tables or network on behalf of WILPF, please contact Marybeth Gardam.  

The W$D Committee meets on the third Tuesday of every month at 8:30 pm EST. Women from across the US are involved in this work. If you are interested in joining W$D, contact Marybeth.