This is ESWA
Fighting to end poverty, volunteers needed 365 days per year!
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History
Learn more about ESWA’s five decades of organizing in Boston and winning victories for low-income workers.
Purpose
To end poverty for working people, ESWA is building a strong organization to attack its root causes.
Accomplishments
ESWA members and volunteers have delivered material victories for working people in the Greater Boston area.
ESWA’s Storied Beginnings in Greater Boston
Power and perseverance in the face of difficulties.
Through the use of our proven method of Systemic Organizing, we have accomplished what others have given up trying to do, or said was impossible, or failed in doing: uniting together Boston’s diverse service sector workers with concerned community residents in an independent, fighting organization free of strings-attached funding. Many of us have found it to be the only thing that really makes sense and have spent five decades building it. You are always welcome to come in and play a role in this historic effort, which began in the South End in 1977.
The solutions to the problems of poverty must come from those who are living them. But low-income workers cannot do it alone. ESWA works daily to unite with others who share our concerns including professionals, students, clergy, professors, business owners and others like you who are needed to expand ESWA’s material manifestation of hope through organization.
ESWA’s programs add value to our communities 365 days a year. Through every food distribution and medical session, averted utility shutoff or eviction, ESWA members and volunteers demonstrate every day that it is possible to deliver, responding to the needs of the lowest-paid workers.
Our rallying cry is ‘Don’t mourn, organize!’
ESWA is totally independent, 100% volunteer and has never taken a dime of government funding. Members learn organizing skills and are encouraged to use those skills to help the next member in need as an important part of the process of building ESWA’s self-help, 11-point membership benefit program. The Benefit Program addresses immediate hardships that often prevent us from working together to forge long-term solutions to our economic problems.
ESWA members who choose to be part of the decision-making process that guides the course of the association’s Benefit Program meet weekly. Together we forge solutions to get at the root of problems such as official policies causing economic devastation in our communities. ESWA is 100% volunteer — that means we rely on people like you to invest your time in helping to advance this vital work! Call (617) 265-9200 today, and ask how you can get involved!
PURPOSE
Eastern Service Workers Association (ESWA) unites Greater Boston’s lowest-paid service workers and their allies to fight to end poverty conditions and the government policies that create them. We recognize that in order to organize, we must take collective action to ensure our day-to-day survival. ESWA’s Benefit Program performs neither acts of charity nor isolated acts of goodwill, but rather helps members to obtain what is rightfully theirs in a context that promotes their best interest on all levels.
Accomplishments
You can learn how to fight to keep a service worker family’s lights on, defeat the policies of energy companies that put profit over people and planet and hold government regulatory agencies accountable, help workers win back unpaid wages, expunge medical debt and fight government and corporate policies that are pushing workers into lower poverty wages.
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Yearly Victories
In response to rising utility costs and rampant shutoffs of low-income families, ESWA members mobilize to hold government agencies, such as the Department of Public Utilities (DPU), accountable to their legal mandate to protect ratepayers. ESWA members have won hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to proposed rate hikes and saved dozens of lives threatened by utility profiteering.
Gains Every Season
Volunteers organize supportive businesses and individuals to collect and distribute produce, dry goods and high-protein foods to save ESWA members hundreds of dollars in grocery bills during periods of the year when expenses for low-income families spike.
Monthly Information and Aid Sessions
Volunteer doctors and pharmacists provide medical education and information sessions on topics like diabetes and medication management. Volunteer attorneys, assisted by volunteer lay advocates, provide free-of-charge legal advice for problems like workplace injuries and wage theft.
Weekly Advocacy Sessions
ESWA runs weekly benefit advocacy sessions to address the varied problems resulting from poverty, training members and volunteers to advocate against and reverse wrongful termination or denial of benefits.
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Daily Building Unity in the Community
ESWA provides a material manifestation of hope by uniting the most exploited workers along with allies from all sectors of our community, canvassing low-income neighborhoods, providing organizer training and showing members and volunteers how to fight and win collective victories.
Is your future in jeopardy? Join service workers in fighting for a living wage for ALL workers!
Illustration by Norberto Perez
KNOW YOUR LOGO
Who Was Sojourner Truth?
Sojourner did not stop fighting for the freedom of all enslaved and oppressed peoples after gaining her own individual freedom. ESWA is guided by Sojourner’s example, organizing under the principle that no worker is left behind and endorsing no solution that is not a solution for all workers.
Featured in ESWA’s logo, Sojourner Truth (1797 - 1883) was a towering American abolitionist and women’s rights activist who was born into slavery in the Hudson Valley area of New York as Isabella Baumfree. She began working at the age of five, was sold three times and endured repeated abuses, rapes and harsh conditions as a slave in New York. In 1826, at the age of 29, she boldly “walked away by daylight” carrying her infant daughter, Sophia, to freedom. She was the first Black person to win a lawsuit in the US after she sued for the emancipation of her enslaved son. She chose the name Sojourner Truth and became a powerful, yet illiterate, preacher and orator, famous for her dictated autobiography detailing her life as a slave and her 1851 “Ain't I a Woman?” speech. She worked with Frederick Douglass on the Underground Railroad and later aided the Union’s war effort in the Civil War. After the formal end of slavery in 1865, Sojourner Truth continued demanding women’s right to vote, which was not won until 1920, decades after her death. Sojourner Truth believed and taught others that it was possible to create a new world through their collective actions, and had the courage to fight for that belief her entire life.