By: Jessica Galloway
Hi all,
This is my second term as a Reproductive Justice intern for Lakeesha Harris at Women With a Vision, and I’m super excited to be here again. As an intern at WWAV, I’ve mostly been doing research about reproductive justice, abortion access, and sexual health and how these play into all of our lives. I’ve also been involved in some community care events, which are put on with the idea that social justice work should always be prioritizing the needs of the communities affected most by the problems we’re fighting.
Which brings me to what might be my number one reason for loving working in this field and for this organization is. That is the level of care that organizers treat each other with. In the second week of this internship term, I was having a pretty hard time. I had sprained my knee, which made the walk to and from the bus stop I use to get to WWAV harder than I expected. I had also broken my phone and didn’t have the funds to immediately get a replacement. This also made catching the bus to work hard, since I use the RTA app as my bus pass.
After limping to the bus stop during a rainy day and struggling to access my bus pass, I realized that I was too late. The bus had passed and there wasn’t another one for another hour. I, like a lot of us, am so used to having jobs where profit is prioritized over the well being of employees, and the thought of telling my supervisor that I was having a tough time and would either be super late to work or not make it at all gave me a lot of anxiety, but I went ahead and told her. Instead of being reprimanded, which you think I might have been by how nervous I was to send the text, I was met with so much compassion. My supervisor told me that an important part of reproductive justice is taking the time we need to heal. It’s so refreshing to be working in an environment that actively follows its values and makes everyone involved feel valuable!