2023 in Review: Letter from the Executive Director

Dear Comrades,

For 24 years, Miami Workers Center has been on the frontlines, envisioning and diligently working towards an ambitious agenda to transform our broken housing ecosystem, improve worker conditions, and build a beloved community of mutual support, sisterhood and solidarity. In 2023, we had some incredible highs fueled by the success of our collective action, securing $5 Million for ERAP and Eviction Diversion in Miami-Dade County and mobilizing hundreds for our newest campaign: a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. We have also had some lows hollowed out by powerful corporate interests and their elected officials and lobbying friends with disproportionate access to power, including preempting some of our Tenant Bill of Rights by governor Desantis, the real estate lobby, and the complacent Florida Legislature. 

Nelson Mandela reminds us that our impact will not be judged by our successes or even by our losses but by our ability to get back up! So we have celebrated our wins with joy and we have responded to our losses with deep reflection, an appreciation of lessons learned, reassessing our hypothesis and regrouping, and centering our resilience as an organization, as a movement and as a beloved community. 

I am so proud of our work, our members, and our team. We grew our membership and strengthened our member-led committees, built our member leaders’ capacity as critical thinkers and strategist to lead campaigns, we sharpened our strategies and tactics, and, and most importantly, we shored up our collective strength through the cultivation of loving, healing and caring spaces for our beloved community. From our direct outreach, to committee meetings and tenant and domestic worker organizing meetings, to campaign planning, to monthly Women’s Circle, to mass mobilizations and direct action, members of MWC are demonstrating our commitment to deep transformative organizing, collective resilience, and keeping our eye on the future.

We are clear-eyed and sober-minded about our opposition. We are organizing in an extremely difficult, challenging, and ever-changing political terrain. We are organizing in Florida and the South, a region where the far right’s stronghold, power, and control  is centralized, organized, and well-resourced. Our corner of the country is the testing ground for regressive policies that threaten all of us.  The work ahead feels daunting but hope is our discipline. We are fighting for our lives.  We will continue to organize. We will continue to get back up. 

Join us, support us, and double down in your commitment to us as we stand up, fight back, and demand the Miami-Dade County, Florida, and South we want and deserve!

In solidarity,
Santra Denis, Executive Director