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Our MissionCEW is an organization dedicated to empowering women through income generating projects, advocacy, and organizing. We help immigrant and refugee women of color start cooperative businesses, while providing and advocating for services necessary to women's survival: food, security, English literacy, legal assistance, and child care. CEW also assists co-op members and associate members organize for changes in their communities.
About US.........Women's lives are remarkably similar all around the world: they raise and procure food, provide shelter, clothing, education and health care. All over the world, women work. They work hard so their families can survive and thrive. Poor women today face obstacles to doing what they consider their primary job - caring for themselves, the children and communities. Health care is not affordable, minimum wage provides only half of what it costs live in Boston, and child care is scarce. Women of color and immigrant and refugee women face added institutional and systemic barriers: the extreme narrow-mindedness and prejudice represented by the race federal welfare and immigration reforms, other efforts to deny legal immigrants access to services their to money has purchased, every day racism endemic in the US, lack of access to English as a Second Language Classes, GED and other educational opportunities . . . the list goes on and on. At Cooperative Economics/or Women (CEW) we organize to address these and other hurdles that women must contend with as they provide for the basic needs of themselves and their families. CEW assists poor women in the greater Boston area confronting the need for income and issues of access to and control of work, especial] women of color, immigrant and refugee women, women surviving violence and women on welfare. Through the creation and operation of worker-owned cooperatives, organizing in language communities I address the needs and struggles of Haitian, Cape Verde an, Cambodian and Eritrean women and general! organizing around social welfare issues, CEW provides participants with control of and access to income, supportive group to learn organizing, cooperation and leadership skills, and membership in an organization which advocates and organizes for a society which prioritizes the economic needs of women and their families Since 1994 CEW has organized five cooperative income-generating projects: Sagla (formerly Abbai) Eritrea Restaurant and Catering Cooperative, Apsara Fashions, Little People Cooperative: Childcare on the Go Morabeza Cleaning Community, and Splash of Color Catering Service. These cooperatives exist because' of our beliefs that: • All people are capable of analyzing their situation and organizing together to change it. • Poor women, by the very fact of their survival, are talented, creative, and skilled. • The experience of oppression in the larger society blinds poor people to their skills, capacity an analytical abilities. Through a methodology based on the work of popular movements in Brazil, Central America and Southern Africa; and utilizing the practice of economic cooperation used in the United States, CEW members build community analyze their conditions, generate income and organize to create better circumstances f( themselves and their communities. CEW provides support to each co-op's efforts through our Children Program, Basic Literacy, Legal Assistance through the Northeastern University Poverty Law Clinic, are through our Associate Membership.
For more information about Cooperative Economics for Women, our member
cooperatives, or our effort organizing for fair treatment of poor women in spite
of current welfare and immigration reforms, please contact the CEW office at 42
Seaverns Avenue, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
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Cooperative
Economics for Women
