2021 Impact Report
Thanks to supporters like you, 2021 was a groundbreaking year. You made a lasting impact in the fight for sex-based rights!
A Letter From WoLF’s Executive Director, Dr. Mahri Irvine
To everyone in our WoLF community,
So far, I’ve only had the honor and privilege of being WoLF’s Executive Director for six months. Several years before the opportunity to help lead WoLF, I was drawn to the steadfast courage and leadership shown by all the women of WoLF, so when I was offered the chance to help lead my very favorite organization, it was an easy decision for me to make. WoLF’s relentless courage and optimism is what has always appealed to me: no matter how dire the circumstances may seem, for the past decade WoLF has been a guiding light – perhaps the guiding light – for women resisting patriarchy in all its insidious forms.
For many years prior to joining WoLF, I was immersed in academia, teaching college classes, reading a multitude of research studies, and interacting with students and academics who often touted themselves as “activists.” I was often struck by how quick people were to critique, complain, and bemoan the circumstances of the world, while not offering up solutions or positive ideas about how to fix the problems they were complaining about. And outside of academia, this theme continued.
“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Just a quick glance into the world of social media provides us with a multitude of examples of people complaining and arguing – often even fighting within their own communities, tearing each other down rather than working toward solutions for complex problems. It is easy to complain, it is easy to blame, and it is easy to incessantly talk about all the things that are wrong in our world. It is so much harder to patiently and strategically try out different strategies in the hope of finding solutions that might work. It is so much harder to sit down and build respectful alliances with agencies that might not share all of our own values. It is so much harder to shine a light of hope and optimism, rather than magnify darkness and gloom.
I joined WoLF because WoLF brings light to our dark world. Over the past nine years, WoLF’s founders, volunteers, board members, and staff members have created an organization that focuses on positive change. WoLF illuminates the voices of radical feminists in the United States and around the world. But we do more than simply amplify radical feminist messages in a society that already has plenty of activists and organizations creating cultural change.
Our work focuses on legal change. We bring radical feminist values into the legal system. We introduce radical feminist messages into state and federal government records through the submission of testimony, amici curiae, model policies, petitions, calls to action, guidance documents, lawsuits, and more. We insert radical feminist values into legal records, where our messages cannot be denied or suppressed or ignored.
Our legal work takes time and energy, and much of it requires patient, methodical, strategic (and often boring!) work conducted quietly and behind the scenes. Legal and policy work is typically not exciting, sensational, or something that can be easily splashed across a social media platform. This type of work requires patience and discipline, as well as a varied set of talents, skills, and personalities. All of WoLF’s successes in 2021 are due to a diverse group of people playing different roles, working together to achieve our mission of protecting, advancing, and restoring the rights of women and girls.
The incredibly hard work of WoLF’s staff members, board members, and volunteers, combined with the profound generosity of donors, made WoLF’s accomplishments possible. In early 2021, WoLF had the opportunity, made possible by a generous capacity-building donor, to hire full-time employees. This significant donation allowed WoLF to start developing a framework for becoming a non-profit agency that will be sustainable in the long term. Of course, I want to acknowledge the hard work and passion that WoLF’s previous Executive Director contributed in helping WoLF secure this important funding.
In WoLF’s 2021 stakeholder survey, we learned that many of our donors are profoundly committed to WoLF’s mission despite their own economic limitations; some of our donors have very low annual incomes, and yet, they have made the decision to financially support WoLF because our mission is so important to them. I want to extend a special acknowledgment to these lower-income donors to let them know that we recognize and deeply appreciate their financial contributions to helping advance women’s rights. Sometimes, people feel that modest donations don’t make a difference. However, for a small organization like WoLF, those donations help keep us moving forward.
As we all look forward to advancing WoLF’s mission in 2022, I promise you that WoLF will continue to lead the fight for women’s liberation in a way that is positive, respectful, and illuminating.
Your courage calls to courage everywhere.
In Solidarity,
Mahri Irvine, PhD
WoLF Executive Director
A big thank you to our donors. We couldn’t do this work without you!