Young Women's Collaborative

Third Wave and Young Women’s Collaborative Launch First Southwest Regional Leadership Training!

More than 40 young leaders from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada came together in February to build a reproductive justice movement in the Southwest! Through a weekend of training, leaders learned how to link social justice and reproductive issues to create cross-movement change and connected with networks of activists and funders. Third Wave and staff from other national organizations partnered with regional and local trainers to provide culturally relevant skills-building and issue-based workshops. Monique, Nathan, and Jessica trained leaders on fundraising, sexual violence, transgender and immigrant health care access, movement building, and electoral campaigning, with Linda supervising filming of the event for our 10 year anniversary video.

young women's collaborative

In the few weeks since the training, leaders have written articles about its impact on their campaigns, organized demonstrations with other alumni, held strategy sessions, and discussed with colleagues the ways they can implement a reproductive justice lens at work. Leaders noted that the Southwest Regional Leadership Training exposed them to new ideas and a unique network of primarily young women and transgender activists of color. Leaders were enthusiastic to “meet and work with this Third Wave” of feminists because, as one attendee noted, “it is not everyday that I get to sit in a room full of amazing women who actually look like me.”

The Young Women’s Collaborative is a partnership between Third Wave Foundation and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and ChoiceUSA .

From a Colorado leader’s perspective
by Jordon T. Garcia

The vision was that if you give a group of young leaders opportunities to get articulate about each others’ struggles for liberation, they’re more likely to work together and create lasting change across movements. I thought, “It’s impossible and down right ridiculous to try and have everyone become completely articulate about all of the different struggles that are out there,” and just stop right there.

I think what the staff at Third Wave, and the other partnering organizations, were banking on is the human nature factor. They hoped that we would actually like each other and once we saw how our movements related we would start to build a collective vision. It didn’t matter that I wouldn’t be able to speak on a panel about the impact of reproductive justice in the African American Community, at least not right away. Because I met, connected and have started to build relationships with people who can. We were also given the opportunity to learn what strengths other leaders bring to their movements. I started to absorb the methods and practices we need to incorporate into each step of that vision of liberation in order to see success. Whether it be speaking to the media or creating a message that changes the heart and minds of thousands rather than dozens, I connected with young leaders who are already creating change all over the Southwest.

The point of the training was to open a can of worms. We got to talk about the ‘worms’ that the mainstream reproductive rights movement doesn’t want to talk about. Instead, we worked to get to a place where the worms (i.e., transgender liberation, low income women’s access, etc) could fit into reproductive justice and into the work that we all do across the board. So that when I want to articulate how immigrant women in Colorado can benefit from a real push for reproductive justice, I know my work as an immigrant rights organizer is stronger and more powerful because I’m talking about everyone’s liberation. That means not pitting folks of color against queer folks, or youth against disability rights activists. Because, as a young trans queer Latina/o, I’m not waiting around for the affinity group of JUST young trans queer Latina/os to show up, I’ve got work to do. And to me that means going to bat for people who aren’t just young trans queer Latina/os, but for all of us.