Invest in Women and Help us Build Back Equal

Aim

Donate now to help women find their voice, their power and each other so we can Build Back Equal from the coronavirus crisis.

The Covid crisis has laid bare and exacerbated the inequalities that divide us. One thing is clear, the politicians who helped to manufacture this crisis do not have the vision to lead us out of it. If we are to Build Back Equal, then we need radical change.

Invest in women and fund the female leaders of tomorrow

Fund the WEP Academy so that we can coach and support more women to be campaigners and activists enabling them to make change happen.

WEP Academy

The WEP Academy will equip women from across the UK with the skills, knowledge and confidence to become active in politics and in their communities to deliver change and empower others. 

The aims of the Academy are to:

• Invest in and mobilise a diverse range of women as activists, community organisers, campaigners, and candidates;
• Field more politically-literate, media-savvy, campaign-confident women in elections across the UK, e.g. local, town councils, Police and Crime Commissioners, metropolitan mayor, and Westminster elections;
• Raise the profile of WEP and the issues we campaign for, and provide role models to women and girls so that we can increase both participation and representation in politics. 

In order to deliver this programme we need your support to fund:

• Marketing of the Academy
• Staff to administer and deliver the Academy
• Expert coaches to deliver content and support participants
• Technical support to deliver workshops both in person and online

We need to raise £35,000 to get the WEP Academy off the ground - help us make this happen.

• £1,000 will fund an online meeting space for a whole year so that our participants can interact with each other from all over the UK.
• £500 will find an expert coach for a day’s workshop which will provide invaluable skills to our activists.

With your donations we hope to put 150 women through the WEP Academy over the first year.

Just think what we could achieve with more empowered women in politics.

We need more women at the table

If the global response to the pandemic has taught us anything about political leadership, it’s that narrow perspectives make for poor decision-making and damaging consequences for the most marginalised. Countries led by women fared systematically and significantly better in the battle against coronavirus, locking down earlier and suffering half as many deaths as those led by men.

If we had more forward-thinking women in leadership positions at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis we could have protected women’s lives by giving urgent support for domestic violence services, and we could have boosted the economy by investing in childcare as vital infrastructure.

Our communities, our country, and the world need women’s leadership now more than ever before.

With your support we can not only lobby those in power to prioritise women but stand more feminist women in leadership positions so that they can shape policies in the first place.

A WE success story

WE already have one town councillor, Kay Wesley in Congleton, who in her short time in office has so far achieved:

• Gained support from the rest of the council to deliver a monthly domestic abuse clinic.
• Brought forward White Ribbon accreditation to help stamp out male violence against women.
• Worked with local parents and providers to improve childcare provision and information.
• Made sure equality, diversity and inclusion are core values in the the council business plan, so that it can be held to account for reducing inequalities.
• Wrote a new Equality and Inclusion Policy for the council.
• Changed the narrative in Congleton by requiring gender neutral language such as “Chair” rather than “Chairman”. This has also been adopted by the local paper, the Congleton Chronicle.
• Got five new Congleton streets named after prominent women from local history.

Just think what we could achieve with more women like Kay in political positions. Your donation will help us run in more elections, deliver crowd-sourced, fully-costed policies and hard-hitting campaigns to change the political landscape and show that equality can be a reality.

Build Back Equal

Build Back Equal: What we’re fighting for

Freedom from the fear of violence

During lockdown we saw an alarming rise in domestic abuse and already overstretched support services were pushed to breaking point. We want the Government to commit to no woman or child being turned away from a refuge and to sustainable funding for support services. This is coupled with a collapse in conviction rates that means that sexual assault has been all but criminalised. Structural sexism in every level of our police, legislative and justice system mean that they repeatedly fail to protect women's lives and freedom. Violence against women isn’t inevitable - it is spiralling as a result of political decisions, and political action can end it. 

If 60 people gave £50 we could film a hard hitting campaign film to get our message out there around ending violence against women and girls.

Childcare as a right, not a privilege

A full economic recovery is impossible until we can guarantee access to childcare for parents who are otherwise unable to work. Propping up providers that many parents could ill afford before the economic downturn is not an answer on it’s own. Now is the time to guarantee free, universal childcare, to stimulate the economy, stop women losing their jobs, and ensure that all children are able to catch up on the months of early years support, development, and social interaction they missed during lockdown.

If 10 people gave £100 we could fund a digital platform for everyone to contact their MP to lobby for free, universal childcare and to protect local childcare services.

How your donations will help

As well as the above, we need your donations so we can fund:

• £2,000 for a billboard in Westminster to get our message straight to those in power.
• £5,000 to project a film onto the Houses of Parliament to ensure the government can't turn a blind eye to inequality.
• £10,000 to create and deliver a fully costed Build Back Equal policy programme.

We're not like the other parties. WE do things differently but WE don't have major corporate or union backing. Your donation WILL make a difference in the fight for equality.

We were told by the Government that Coronavirus was a “great leveller” but we always knew it would be the great revealer. It shone a light on the deep inequalities in our country, and the poorest and most vulnerable are being hit the hardest:

• The health and care workers who saw us through this crisis are not even paid a real living wage and their work is classified as “unskilled”.
• Black people are twice as likely to be killed by the virus compared to white people, even when you take into account other factors such as age and health.
• Parents have been expected to carry on working without any childcare or support, and a quarter of nurseries will be forced to close by April.
• The sectors where women work have faced the biggest closures and more women have been furloughed or made redundant than men.
• The number of women killed by their partners doubled during lockdown. A rise in abuse cases coupled with lack of resources for service providers led to a violence crisis and failed the 1.6m women a year who experience domestic violence in the UK. Funding cuts to refuges of around 50% since 2011, along with a surge in reported incidences of abuse meant that 60% of those turning to refuges for support this year were turned away.

This is political. We need to stand up and fight for equality.

Thank you for your support.

The legal bit...

As we're a political party we're required to run permissibility checks on donations over £500. These will be completed as you make your donation and therefore we can't accept anonymous donations over £500.

If you give over £500 your details will appear in our election returns, and if you donate over £7,500 your name will appear on the Electoral Commission website. 

Published and promoted by Alice Larden on behalf of the Women's Equality Party at Unit 3, 2 Tunstall Road, Brixton, SW9 8BN.

This project successfully funded on 17th December 2020