Policy Positions
YWCA is on a mission to eliminate racism, empower women, stand up for social justice, help families, and strengthen communities.
We’ve been at the forefront of the biggest issues from voting rights to civil rights, from affordable housing to pay equity, and from violence prevention to health care reform. We carry on this long tradition of social action and advocacy to advance our mission — and you are a crucial part of this work. Your voice is critical as we advocate for policies that bring us closer to eliminating racism, empowering women, and ensuring peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all.
Our approach to advocacy is inclusive and intersectional and believes in the power of a beloved community that builds partnerships and coalitions with other YWCAs and beyond to achieve policy goals. This includes developing an advocacy committee with clearly defined roles and responsibilities to build capacity and leverage existing community strengths and assets. Advocacy at YWCA Lancaster looks like effective and fiscally-responsible work between leadership, community, news media, and elected officials to create a more just society. We seek to influence laws, policies, and systems that affect long-term legal and cultural change in our community at the local, state, and federal level.
YWCA Lancaster’s advocacy agenda is broken down into four priority areas: promoting women's economic security, increasing health education and access, securing racial justice, and ending gender-based violence. These agenda items are driven by our county-wide racial equity profile, which unearths the systemic racial inequalities in Lancaster County. This profile, the first in Pennsylvania, is developed by the national equity firm PolicyLink in partnership with nine other prominent Lancaster County community benefit organizations.
YWCA Lancaster addresses contemporary political issues and advocates for the rights of all women and racialized groups with an intersectional approach. The Board of Directors supports the following public policies:
ACCOMPLISHING OUR MISSION STARTS WITH OUR THEORY OF CHANGE.
We Believe:
That until Black queer women are free, none of us will be free.
We must explicitly name the problems of white supremacy and patriarchy and reflect and act on how it influences our own personal socialization and identity and organizational biases.
While individual level oppression is important to address, we must do it in a way that is rooted in action and continuously improves systems and institutions, so our work lives beyond any individual.
We must center the voices and needs of communities impacted by systemic oppression.
In meeting the moment with constantly evaluated individual and organizational learning.
That liberation is a constant struggle that relies on a beloved community to create power and generational change. And along with the struggle, we must remember to acknowledge the true human connection found in centering joy.
Women’s Economic Security
Expanding opportunities for women’s success
Women are the primary source of financial support for many families and bear significant caretaking responsibilities at home. At YWCA Lancaster, we believe no one should have to choose between their livelihoods and their health, their family, or their safety. Yet because of their dual roles as caregivers and primary breadwinners, many women in the workforce, particularly women of color, are often forced to choose between their family’s economic security and their health when they or their loved ones need care. Moreover, women continue to face the economic barriers of pay inequity, sexual harassment, and discrimination.
YWCA Lancaster supports policies which would take immediate action to:
Work toward equal pay for equal work
Enact nondiscrimination laws, such as the Equality Act, the Fairness Act, and the Crown Act. This would also include the Equal Rights Amendment.
Prohibit sexual harassment based on gender and gender identity in the workplace
Improves Pre-K Access for all children throughout the Commonwealth
Ensures representation of women in the workplace and in places of power and decision-making
Codify paid family and medical leave, paid sick, and safe leave that are inclusive of all families, with strong accountability and job protection requirements
Improve access to high-quality and affordable childcare
Addresses the issue of the creation of and access to affordable housing
Ensure representation in the workforce for women
Improving Pre-K access for children
Current Legislation & Advocacy Areas:
Fair Housing Access (formerly HB1769)
Gov. Shapiro’s Childcare Budget Proposal for 2025-2026 Budget Year:
YWCA Lancaster supports the recruitment and retention of high-quality childcare professionals to meet the needs of the almost 800,000 families throughout the Commonwealth who rely on their services. We urge lawmakers to pay these workers a livable wage that promotes their dignity and ability to provide for themselves and their families, while also relieving the childcare crisis faced by our state. The lack of childcare professionals has a significant and negative impact on our local economies and hits our most vulnerable families—African American, Latino, and low-income families—the hardest. When folks can’t find childcare, they can’t work. We support Start Strong PA’s proposal urging the Shapiro Administration to invest $284 million in new and ongoing state funding to implement a childcare teacher recruitment and retention initiative in the 2025-2026 state budget.
Health Education and Access
For more than fifty years, YWCA USA has supported the reproductive freedom of all people to make fundamental decisions about whether and when to have children. In issuing its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and with it more than 50 years of legal precedent, disproportionately impacting the lives of young women and people of color who are already marginalized in our healthcare system. While racial disparities in health care increase pregnancy concerns for Black women, they also face a maternal health crisis that leaves them at four times greater risk of dying due to a pregnancy-related death, deepening the impacts of the decision in Dobbs. Bodily autonomy and the right to have an abortion are fundamental rights of all persons.
YWCA Lancaster supports policies which would:
Codify equal access to safe, legal abortion care for all
Strengthen maternal health and improve health outcomes for survivors of domestic and sexual violence as well as women of color
Support the creation of a local public health department for Lancaster County
Increase access to comprehensive mental health services that are culturally responsive and trauma-informed throughout the County
Safety from Gender-based Violence
We Must Prevent Gender-Based Violence and Support Survivors
Women and girls of all ages, income levels, racial and ethnic communities, immigration status, sexual orientations, gender identities, and religious affiliations[IC1] [SK2] continue to experience violence in the form of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, dating violence, stalking, and trafficking. YWCA Lancaster works for practical solutions to protect survivors, hold perpetrators of sexual violence accountable, and eradicate all forms of gender-based violence.
Against this backdrop, YWCA Lancaster calls on all elected officials to act on the following issues:
Common-sense solutions that decrease the threat of intimate partner gun homicide
Job-protected safe leave and compensation to enable survivors to seek medical and legal support without facing the double threat of a loss of income and livelihood
Safe, inclusive school environments that are free from sexual violence, are supportive of survivors, and that respect and affirm gender identity and expression.
Policies that would prohibit women who are the victims of sexual violence from housing discrimination and eviction as they are seeking safety for themselves and their families
Racial Justice
Eliminating policies and practices that criminalize and disenfranchise people of color
YWCA Lancaster is committed to ensuring that everyone is afforded equal opportunity and equal protection under the law. Too often, however, stereotypes, biases, and racial power dynamics are embedded in our laws and public policies, impacting a broad range of issues across K-12 and higher education, criminal justice, civic engagement, health outcomes, employment, and other sectors. YWCA Lancaster’s intersectional mission to eliminate racism and empower women demands that we advocate against the oppression and inequities that many groups and individuals endure.
YWCA Lancaster urges bold action by elected officials to advance racial justice to:
Pass legislation that addresses racism as a public health crisis and marshal resources across sectors to promote health and well-being in communities of color
Defend and protect equal access to the ballot box
Enact laws that safeguard people of color from police violence and increase police accountability
Enact policies and laws that fight against a caste-like system in the United States, which has resulted in systemic mass incarceration that disproportionately affects Black and brown citizens, denying them rights and opportunities.
Create safe, equitable educational environments that support learning for all students that fight the school-to-prison pipeline and invest the necessary resources for Black and brown children to have access to fully-funded pre-K and K-12 education.
Current legislation & advocacy areas:
Fully and equitably funded public education: Pennsylvania is in the bottom five in the nation in its equitable funding of schools. Because of the extreme reliance on property taxes, schools that have a disproportionate amount of low income and BIPOC students are affected the most. YWCA Lancaster is advocating for legislation which implements recommendations of the Basic Education Funding Commission’s Majority Report for public schools which aims to close the current $4 billion adequacy gap between our state’s wealthiest and poorest school districts over a period of 5 years while lessening tax burden on low-wealth districts. We urge the Shapiro administration to implement the funding plan as laid out in the comprehensive report. All children, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, deserve an education which sets them up for a lifetime of success.
Safe and supportive preK-12 education: Schools should be places where students feel comfortable in their own skin and identity, regardless of racial identity, gender identity, and sexual orientation. YWCA Lancaster opposes any attempts for local school boards, state government, or federal government, to prevent classrooms where students feel accepted and valued regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, or anything else. C
Questions about our positions or want to get involved in our mission?
Susan Knoll (she/her/ella)
Chief Mission Officer
717-393-1735, ext. 239
sknoll@ywcalancaster.org