Although Wendy Chun-Hoon is our new executive director at Family Values @ Work (FV@W), she’s been a part of the organization in one way or another for over a decade. In Part One of this profile of Wendy, we learn a little about her home life and a lot about how she came to join the social justice movement for paid leave.
1. Tell me a little about yourself.
How I got to DC
My partner, Emily, wanted to move to New York. I was set on San Francisco. We settled in DC as a random compromise. As it turns out, a nearly 20-year compromise! Both so far from home, we’ve made our life here with our chosen family — beloved neighbors, friends from the soccer club we founded. On our 10th anniversary, while brunching at The Diner in Adams Morgan, living our best DINK lives, we opened the paper and saw that marriage was finally legal in California (not the first state with marriage equality but the first we’d plausibly reside in). Within a few short weeks we were married, surrounded by friends, under the gold glow of the dome in San Francisco’s City Hall. After that, we worked hard to have kids, two boys, which we’re now working even harder to raise to be feminists. And they now play soccer with our former teammates’ kids! We moms coach while grumbling about our latest injuries and the current occupant of the White House.
2. You’ve been with Family Values @ Work for some time. Tell me how you first got into this work and why you’ve stayed so long.
I was a fresh-out-of-grad-school, young program officer at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2003 when I first met Ellen Bravo, Netsy Firestein and Marilyn Watkins — amazing women warriors fighting for paid time to care in Wisconsin, California and Washington, respectively. The three would soon found the multi-state consortium we now call Family Values @ Work. They pitched me on the idea as we met over wine and salty peanuts in a dark hotel lobby in Washington, DC.
At the time, the country was in the throes of an all too familiar, zero-sum debate over “welfare-to-work”. The hypocrisy of it was suffocating. Mothers with young kids running the poverty wages hamster wheel for the promise of a racist, patriarchal, barely-there safety net, getting flung off when kids got sick or child care fell through, over and over again. That year, Elizabeth Warren’s book cited having a child as the single best predictor of bankruptcy.
But California had just won the country’s first paid family leave program. Finally, a policy that made sense! Ellen, Netsy and Marilyn knew we could win in other states by joining forces, sharing strategy and raising money together to build the movement, policy models and the momentum to win nationwide, for everyone. I was hooked! With a $15,000 grant from Casey and more from the Ford Foundation, leaders from eight states brought their fierce activism around one table and collectively launched the Family Values @ Work network.
When Ellen called me to come back to help lead FV@W in 2011, their early dream had started to root; the network had replicated California’s paid leave win in New Jersey, and two cities had forged new ground with experimental paid sick days policies. Nine years later, our wins total 60 new laws that extend new rights to paid time to care for more than 50 million workers and their loved ones.
Every single one of these wins has been powered by our own deep longing to overcome the isolation we feel believing our lack of time and financial wherewithal to provide care for our loved ones is our personal failure. These wins are powered by our investment in building relationships — personal and institutional — that ensure that we remain committed to inclusive and comprehensive policy reform so that we don’t compromise each others’ needs. These wins are only possible because of years of building muscle together to take collective action to up-end the systematic oppression of scarcity politics fueled by capitalism.
This spirit was alive the first time I sat with Ellen, Netsy and Marilyn. I witnessed it the afternoon leaders from the eight founding states gathered to launch Family Values @ Work. It’s alive in every hard loss and every glorious win across the network. We have built a movement together to demand what we need.
I’m dedicated to the badass women who power this movement and our collective commitment to be free.
3. What is the significance of this work personally for you?
I had a moment a few years back when I realized that the paid leave policies we were winning — that I spent every day defending and lifting up — would not even protect my own family because they constrained the definition of “family” to just married spouse, parent, child. I remember feeling outraged as I was talking with Jared Make, a friend from a sister organization, A Better Balance, about this. I suddenly wanted to expose this dirty little secret as a massive failure of our collective imagination fueled by our queer internalized oppression. I recalled conversations with inside-the-beltway allies who couldn’t understand why the powerful and well-funded LGBTQ groups wouldn’t put their weight behind these policies in Congress (they had nothing to gain!).
I began asking hard questions of our state partners about the tensions within their coalitions between, for example, faith-based and LGBTQ and reproductive justice partners. I scanned our network for staff who identified as LGBTQ so we could talk about organizing opportunities as well as barriers and how to overcome them. Working with Jared, we convened a table we called the Family Justice Network, building relationships with peers from LGBTQ equality, reproductive justice, labor and disability justice spaces to help hold us accountable for winning more inclusive family definitions within these paid leave laws. Together, we crafted a “gold standard” definition of family as any “individual related by blood or whose close association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship.”
Together, we created the collective mirror for the field, reflecting a more courageous and powerful stance: Include all of us.
We’ve since won the right to paid time to care for anyone we consider our family through 11 brand new paid sick/safe days laws, including 3 states and the 3 most populous cities in our country, and through 3 of the most robust, inclusive paid leave laws. Through these laws, more than 22 million workers are now protected by our “gold standard” definition of family.
Our next horizon is to implement these inclusive laws so that they actually achieve their intended impact! In the meantime, this work has impacted our network in powerful ways. Inclusive family recognition has become a hallmark principle for all campaigns, including the federal campaigns for paid time to care. As a network, we now affirm that our policy and culture change work must ensure recognition of diverse family structures connected by blood, choice, or affinity—including LGBTQI+, single-parent households, extended families, incarcerated families, transnational families, adoptive families and more. We must do this in solidarity with movements that are fighting to end all forms of family separation.
