Marking 100 years in South Florida, YWCA launches effort to boost 300 local women
Few organizations have existed in South Florida as long as the YWCA. Today, a century after its founding in Miami, its work has never been more urgent.
The numbers are grim: Among Miami’s female-led households, 80% live paycheck-to-paycheck, according to the United Way’s annual ALICE report documenting asset-limited, income constrained, employed residents.
And the COVID-19 pandemic only cemented that precarious status.
To start to chip away at this state of affairs, the YWCA of South Florida, led by president and CEO Kerry-Ann Royes, is embarking on one of its most ambitious projects. The goal: To change the economic outcomes of South Florida’s minority women.
“We’ve always done economic justice and financial coaching,” Royes said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “But this time we recognized that we needed to recession- and repression-proof our women to help them stop riding the wave of every pandemic, or hurricane, or downturn — because they have always been at the mercy of whatever the environment has brought. We wanted to focus on long-term, generational economic changes and outcomes.”
To do so, the YWCA is launching three initiatives. First, it is creating a Race and Gender Advancement Office that will use training, storytelling and civic engagement to promote social and racial justice and equity.
“We want our corporate and community partners to look at themselves as leaders and ask themselves, ‘How am I [changing] this space to let [minority women] be successful? How am I changing the culture of my organization to create more equity?’ ” Royes said.
It is also creating an Economic Justice Council, with the goal of placing or advancing 300 women of color in the workforce. To achieve that objective, the YWCA plans to direct the women into professional certification programs and ultimately enter a new earnings path.
The programs include certified nursing assistants, customer service representatives, technology roles and construction sector positions. Royes envisions a scenario in which a woman currently working in a low-paying or dead-end job is referred to the YWCA and is subsequently “wrapped around” by the organization’s support. In addition to the certification, that would include “soft-skills” training, like communication and problem-solving techniques and removing obstacles or barriers to the woman’s advancement, like addressing child care and transportation concerns.
Among the YWCA’s many partners in these efforts are Florida Memorial University, South Florida’s only Historically Black College and University. Jacqueline Hill, the school’s associate provost for continuing education and professional studies, said it is providing certification programs in construction sectors like electrical services and OSHA compliance, as well as home healthcare aides, through its faculty. Individuals who complete these certifications are immediately eligible for employment.
The YWCA, she said, is able to provide vouchers for child care and transportation services to women who otherwise may not be able to afford them.
“Those are the kind of obstacles that may slow down opportunities [for women] to progress from an economic standpoint,” Hill said.
Finally, the YWCA is building a “Social Innovation Village” behind its Miami Gardens Intergenerational Center that will serve as a partner and physical extension to nonprofits including The Arc, HisHouse Children’s Home and Center for Family and Child Enrichment. The Village will support hundreds of South Florida’s youth with the necessary resources and programs they need to thrive. And it will be built using minority architects, contractors and designers to invigorate job creation for minority-owned businesses in South Florida, YWCA said.
Though its goals are ambitious, Royes recognizes there are inherent limits to what the YWCA can do. So it is doubling down on its strengths.
“What we can do is help people to empower themselves and feel like they’re not alone,” Royes said. “We’re good at removing barriers and finding partners in situations that can feel incredibly confusing — especially when you don’t have the same access as more well-resourced people do.”
In the meantime, Royes said she hopes to prevent social justice from becoming something society gets “bored” with.
“These are systemic issues,” she said. “So they require long-term, systemic support.”
