The Hot Pink Paper Municipal Campaign 2018 Blog
By: Ellen Woodsworth
http://www.womentransformingcities.org/hot-pink-paper-challenge
Women Transforming Cities ensured the election of a feminist Mayor and eight of the ten Councillors are women. They and their parties all committed to the Hot Pink Paper Campaign to make Vancouver a women friendly city.
The Hot Pink Paper 2018 put forward a campaign of eleven key issues to make Vancouver a women friendly city. We stated that women and girls work for cities but cities don’t work for women and girls. On each issue starting with the city using a gender intersectional lens on policy, programme, budgets, funding, staffing and governance, we asked Mayoral Candidates and political parties to state their commitment to the issue and the actions. We hosted a Hot Pink Pathways to a Women Friendly Vancouver Forum as well as a forum in Surrey with cross party speakers and issue focused workshops lead by experts from the women’s movement. We also held many neighbourhood cafes to choose and develop key issues listening to local women.
The key issues impacting women and girls in our city chosen were: gender intersectional lens, Housing, Environment, Violence, Child Care, Transit, Electoral Reform, Youth, Indigenous, Immigrant, Refugees, Migrants, and Women, Work and Income. We developed two or three key actions for each issue and backgrounders to explain why that issue and posted it all on our website. Then we started a city wide media campaign through Facebook, our website, our newsletter, LinkedIn, the mass media and emails to all women’s organizations asking for their support.
We developed a report card Framework that we asked the Parties and Mayoral candidates to fill in which we posted on our website to show their support on each issue. We attended the all candidates meetings to hand out the Hot Pink Paper a bright pink three and a half by four inch accordion folded flyer stating the issue and the asks for each issue. We went on the mass media and issued by weekly press releases highlighting each issue.
By the final week of the campaign we were able to announce that all the major parties had filled in the Framework and called for people to read the commitments to make an informed vote for a women friendly city. A major loss is that there is almost no diversity of race, sexuality or indigeneity.
Next step in the new year is to lobby the new Mayor and Council to follow through on their commitments to gender intersectional actions to create a Women Friendly City.
