Our First Five Years...
Today marks our FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY working to achieve reproductive justice for poor & marginalized women, teens and their families in Tennessee. As we reflect on these first five years, we have to thank our Sustaining Partners who as community members continue to resource and inform our work. We thank the funding community for investing in our organization, our organizational partners who have supported us financially and through technical support. And finally, our community members who allow us to come into their neighborhoods, churches, schools, community centers and homes so that we might impart vital education and community mobilization strategies that ensure that each of us have access to reproductive justice. 
During these five years, SisterReach has used a 4-pronged strategy of education, policy & advocacy, and culture change work in order to reach and mobilize our base. We’ve utilized community dialogues, targeted voter education and faith community engagement strategies to build and expand those relationships and build power among our stakeholders.

In this special addition news letter, we wanted to take a little time to reflect on how amazing this journey has been and glance into the future to see where we're headed. 
Our Visionary
I have been honored to work in the Reproductive Justice movement for over 10 years. I was almost thirty years old when I found myself between bringing a baby into this world I knew I'd have to raise as a single parent or having an abortion. As a grown woman, I still did not know all I needed to know about my reproductive and sexual health. Adulthood is no marker for understanding your reproductive health or automatically means you know how to access vital information about your body.

My experience of being intentionally misled by a crisis pregnancy center posing as an abortion clinic would be the catalyst for the work that has become my career, part of my liberation from sexual health ignorance, and my ministry.

I'm not an anomaly. There are so many grown women and girls who like me only had information passed down by the prior generation from women who knew how to teach survival, even if they were not medically savvy with age appropriate, scientifically accurate sexual health information. My life changed once I was taught about my reproductive and sexual health. Once I understood my body, I could control when and if I wanted to be pregnant and could apply life saving information I'd learned about how not to contract a sexually transmitted infection.

In 2011, I relocated back to Memphis and with the urging of my mother and grandmother, founded SisterReach, currently the only Reproductive Justice organization in the state of Tennessee. SisterReach was created for women and girls just like me. It was created to center our lived experiences, amplify our voices and leadership as Black women and women of color, and to equip us with life-saving, life-changing information so that we will not die. Hosea 4:6 has been the biblical scripture employed since the foundation of SisterReach - "Without knowledge, the people perish". It really comes down to life and death when doing human rights work on behalf of ourselves and others. SisterReach exists for just this reason. To offer education, advocacy and fight reproductive oppression so that women and girls might have a fair shot at life, and that more abundantly.

Special thanks to my Mama (Pearl Williams) & Granny (Rev. Dr. Ruth Mosley) for pushing me to realize my own power, reminding me to stand in the authority of God and how to make the sweetest lemonade out of all life's lemons. I honor you.
Key Accomplishments
Our first five years have been nothing short of amazing! SisterReach has used a strategy of education, policy & advocacy, and culture change work in order to reach and mobilize our stakeholders. 

SIsterReach Leadership Team
These dynamic women are responsible for sustaining the mission and vision of SisterReach.

Whether it is mobilizing faith communities, educating voters, advocating for youth, amplifying our message and work, or making reproductive health accessible to gender non-conforming people. These women, our entire staff and volunteer team work every day to ensure women and girls in Tennessee realize reproductive justice. 

Part of SisterReach's mission is to recruit women of color and gender non-conforming people from the community and academic level in order to build a robust and comprehensive team that engage in this work from their lived experience.

We are committed to cultivating and amplifying the leadership and expertise of women most impacted by reproductive oppression.
We look forward to serving women, teens and families in TN for the next five years and for years to come, but we cannot do this work without your support. In honor of our FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY we kicked off our Sustaining Partner program this year. Supporters from all over the country have joined this giving campaign for as little as $5.

Because of your generous investments, SisterReach has already raised over $10,000 this year!!! Resources have been applied toward our education programming and toward staffing for our education department! YOU did that.

Go to our website now and become a Sustaining Partner. There you will find different partnership levels and incentives for participation. 
"Do not despise these small beginnings, for the  Lord  rejoices to see the work begin..." Zechariah 4:10 (NLT) 
Who could have imagined a conversation that started around the kitchen table would have become SisterReach! But then again, all the amazing things in the world happen when women come together. We’re just getting started and look forward to your support for many years to come!

Happy Anniversary 
SisterReach and thanks to all of you! 

The SisterReach Team
SisterReach | 901.222.4425 | www.sisterreach.org I contactus@sisterreach.org