We were made for this.

To our Community and Beyond,

All of us at Women’s Earth Alliance are thinking of you, your families, communities, and organizations during this time. From our home headquarters to yours, we are cheering for you—as you juggle work, home-schooling, financial stressors, staying connected to loved ones, community organizing, and remaining healthy. And for those of you who are on the frontlines providing services or caring for those in need, THANK YOU.

Times like these reveal the fractures in our world with stunning clarity. We can see how human behavior and unjust systems leave our communities more vulnerable. Women, for example, are shouldering the brunt of COVID-19 in many ways, not only because we are overwhelmingly the caregivers and nurses, but because we are hit hard by the health, economic and social impacts of the outbreak.

These unprecedented challenges are teaching us about global resiliency. The same collaborative mindset that will beat this pandemic and its widespread social and economic disruption, is the one we need to address the climate crisis. We now have evidence that governments can take swift action and individuals everywhere can dramatically shift behavior for the greater good. As we recognize there is no place on Earth unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic, we realize we are inextricably linked. Indeed, the only way to stay safe as a global community is to look out for each other and the most vulnerable. As Christiana Figueres, the former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, shared yesterday, these are the crucial lessons “we needed to learn in order to enter a new era of radical, collaborative action to cut emissions and slow climate change.”

Radical, collaborative action is at the very core of WEA. As we write this, women-led climate and environmental programs in Kenya, Nigeria, the U.S., India, and Indonesia are scaling to meet this moment. Our colleagues have food forests growing, drought-resistant plants in the ground, and community solar farms humming. They have food banks, seed banks, and micro-banks. They are sharing not hoarding, organizing not isolating, and innovating not retracting.