March is Women’s Month!

2022 began for me without three significant women I’d lost in 2021, who had been in my life since the day of my birth.  I often reflect and appreciate the ancestral women on whose shoulders I stand.  If it hadn’t been for women of our ancestry, we wouldn’t be walking this earth.

I come from a line of female educators who in the 1950s had to be some of the first innovators to provide child care for working Black families in Philadelphia.  My older brother was one of the young babies in my grandmother and great aunt’s family care center on the first floor of a two-family house.  It seems I have come full circle as I appreciate the work United Way undertakes to fund and support home-based child care providers – many of them women-owned – with our Shared Services initiative.

This Women’s history month, we salute the women who are paving the road,  shattering glass ceilings, and shouldering the joys and trials of womanhood. Sheroes in every way and so much for us to learn from them all – let’s rewrite history to be equitable, inclusive, and HERSTORY!

Looking for more?  Check out fabulously talented author, educator, and filmmaker Thato Mwosa’s recently released “14 African Women Who Made History: Phenomenal African Women” and her coming-of-age feature film “Memoirs of a Black Girl.”

Note: today’s post was contributed by United Way of Mass Bay’s Senior Director of Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives Karen Groce Horan.  The author’s grandmother Ruby Brown is pictured above.