Nature, Culture & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership by Nina Simons

Author:Nina Simons [Simons, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

AI-JEN POO

Ai-jen Poo has been organizing immigrant women workers since 1996. The daughter of pro-democracy activists who emigrated from Taiwan, she felt called to work for those who help raise our children and care for the ill and elderly, without whom many families would be unable to function. Until recently these people who are so essential to our families and communities have labored incredibly long hours under appalling conditions with almost no protections or rights, no overtime, no health insurance, and no safety net. Watching her grandfather deteriorate in a nursing home but finding a good caregiver for her grandmother, she experienced firsthand the impact that a good caregiver had on her entire family’s life, but she knew that domestic work is among the most underappreciated forms of labor in our society.

“What,” she asks, “could be more important than caring for the people who care for us? It’s the kind of job that’s not even seen as a real job. Domestic workers and caregivers go to work every day and support the dignity and wellbeing of others. There is something uniquely human about caring and doing for others,” she declares.

By mobilizing caregivers to fight to improve the systems that support them, she’s taking a stand on behalf of the nurturing and relational part of our humanity, and seeking to transform core aspects of our culture. She has had very large-scale successes and gained a lot of national recognition for her organizing and advocacy work, but she remains consistently humble, caring and receptive herself, modeling the kind of care she’s defending.

She is a remarkably skilled organizer who has been successful in helping large groups of some of the most disenfranchised people in our society achieve dignity and a better life. She has been able to help incorporate new constituencies into the labor movement and to build broad, effective coalitions and alliances. In 2000, she helped start Domestic Workers United (DWU), a New York-based organization that spearheaded the passage of the state’s historic Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which in turn helped lead to the creation of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an alliance of domestic workers in 19 cities and 11 states, working to gain respect, recognition, and legal protections for America’s 2.5 million domestic workers.

Ai-jen then helped launch the visionary “Caring Across Generations” campaign that seeks to unite mostly immigrant homecare workers with the increasing number of elders needing care as the baby boom generation ages. If these two very different groups could recognize their common interest in creating a healthy, well-regulated home-care sector that provides decent wages and high quality care, then, Ai-jen figured, a powerful, mutually beneficial movement that protects the rights of immigrant workers, provides good jobs, and offers excellent healthcare for the young and the elderly could coalesce and help address a number of our most pressing social problems. This is truly a stroke of political genius and “whole systems thinking.”

Ai-jen radiates both profound compassion and a burning desire for fairness. The way she sees leadership

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