National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice

Community base building: we are committed to build community power by investing and advancing the leadership development of our activist base, the poderosas. The cornerstone of our relational organizing efforts - the poderosas mountain - starts with tapping the interest of our community through our community education, civic and voter engagement, advocacy and non-violent actions and mobilization efforts; and in our core states, walks with them through intensive transformational Reproductive Justice and political education trainings that build on their own personal power and consciousness. We help co-create brave and supportive spaces that harness collective power in efforts to build a more just world.

Movement building approach to policy advocacy: collaborative planning with all stakeholders is central to creating policy agendas and campaigns. Issue campaigns must also be centered in our communities, and specifically with our poderosas. Our teams at the state and National level work together with poderosas to implement strategies that tackle the historical exclusion of latinas/xs from the planning, development, and implementation of policy campaigns. Our focus is to bridge the current fragmentation between federal, state, and municipal initiatives and integrate the voices of the poderosas and other stakeholder into the process.

Culture shift: we build power by shaping, shifting, and driving narratives of poderosas and the laina/x community overall. Latina Institute engages in culture shift to actively transform the historic and current misrepresentation of the latina/x community and replace them with our stories of strength and power. To advance our mission, demonstrable shifts in public perceptions of latinas/xs, latina/x opinion on key issues, and public discourse around abortion, immigration, and health are required. Our culture shift work is a thread that ties everything we do community base building, a movement building approach to public advocacy, and communications.