About Us

Mamas of Color Rising is a collective of working class and poor mothers of color based in and around Austin, TX. We are interested in organizing ourselves and other women/mamas of color around issues with accessing needs like food, housing, education and safety, finding out together what our larger ideal community looks like and building it together.

We are living in a world where the labor of caretaking is INVISIBLE socially and economically. It’s no surprise that most of the world’s poor people are mothers and their children. Imagine all the hours of UNWAGED work that is not counted in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The GDP would almost double if unwaged domestic work were counted. Working class mothers, particularly single parents and women of color are caught in low-wage work that barely provides enough income to cover childcare, much less other basic rights. And the Welfare “social safety net” scrutinizes and polices poor mothers instead of providing support to all families and recognition that “mothering” is work.

In this country, most interactions with social services and institutions have become a WEB of discrimination and humiliation, a WEB difficult to get out of. Our vision of organizing around motherhood is not a biological one, it’s not just about bio moms, or even moms, but about all of those members of a community who share in the often undervalued and invisible work of caretaking and parenting. But it’s not just symbolic either, because unfortunately right now its mothers and other women who do the vast majority of the work of taking care of children, elders, and sick folks who cannot take care of themselves.

As Mamas of Color Rising, we want to bring out these issues to public conversation and struggle. We see this work as a way to challenge the patriarchal and isolating model of nuclear family units AND as a way of creating social justice for everyone because a society is only as good/strong/just, as how it treats its children and elders.

We are currently documenting stories of welfare abuse (from Medicaid, to Subsidized Childcare, to Child Protective Services, to Birthing while Low-Income). Check out our zine, Revolutionary Motherhood, which we wrote in collaboration with Young Women United. With the Revolutionary Mamas of Color National Survey we will continue to gather and document these stories in order to build our local membership base and identify a local organizing campaign.

To contact us, please send email to mamasofcolorrising@gmail.com