This featured guest piece is an excerpt of our December 2024 newsletter.

Dear MCSW Community:

It’s hard to believe we’re here at the beginning of December 2024, but I hope the coming Holiday season finds you and your families happy and healthy.

Here at the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women (MCSW), our mission is to promote rights and opportunities for all women and girls across the Commonwealth. We do this work in partnership with our 11 regional bodies, local and state elected officials, countless community organizations, and so many others who work to make a difference every day to improve our lives and circumstances. Our Commission is comprised of people from all across the state, from all walks of life, in diverse positions of leadership across the Commonwealth.

As women, we do not lead single-issue lives. As a State Commissioner first appointed by Senate President Karen Spilka in June of 2022, my identity, as a South Asian woman, as a child of immigrants, as a mother, as an executive director, has shaped the values I hold and my desire for progress in the world. In both my personal and professional lives, I strive to live these values in the policies I advance and the work we undertake as a community.

My children are one of the reasons I work to combat a system that I feel no longer represents us – a gendered, hierarchical, patriarchal vision of society; “an [old] vision of the family that relies on fixed and narrowly defined gender roles,” according to the National Women’s Law Center. The idea that women have just one purpose in our society couldn’t be further from the truth. As a Commission, we’re here to advance policies that ensures women have the choice to lead the lives they want.

My children were very involved in this election. Folks in Arizona got postcards from my 11-year-old. But as the election cycle progressed, the mood on the left shifted from excitement about the future to fear about the unknown. The week before Election Day, my 9-year-old asked me to remove the sign in our yard because he was afraid we were going to be attacked.

The morning after the election, he looked at me over breakfast quite seriously and said, “Have you ever had to pick up and move?” And while I reassured him, we were safe, I had to pause and think of the impact our national discourse was having on my family and our lives. Do my children simply know more than the average 9- and 11-year-old because we’re a political family? Or perhaps because they’re growing up in a digital world where information moves quickly and is often unverified? What I know for sure is that families all across the country are having these conversations.

The reality is that for those of us who are “different,” who are raising children who are “different,” who have nontraditional families, or careers, or even lives, now we must work twice as hard not only to protect their rights, but to cultivate hope in ourselves and trust in our children that we can carry the torch forward to leave the next generation a world in which they are safe and respected.

At one point in the Vice President’s concession speech, she stated, “I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up. I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions, and aspirations. Where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body and not have their government telling them what to do. We will never give up the fight to protect our schools and our streets from gun violence. And America we will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for equal justice, and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld.”

And so, I consider it a duty and a privilege to turn to action. As the Vice-Chairwoman of MCSW’s Legislative & Public Policy Committee, this coming year is slated to be a dynamic one. With the 194th Legislative session beginning in January, our 2025-2026 proposed slate of legislation is robust and ambitious. Save the Date for the MCSW’s 2025 Advocacy Day at the Massachusetts Statehouse and join us in speaking with legislators from across the state about both issues and solutions to realities we’re facing here in the Commonwealth.

I look forward to charting a new path forward – to advancing an agenda that will have lasting and positive impacts that will protect and preserve the rights of all women, children, and families in Massachusetts.

In solidarity,
Sonia Shah
MCSW State Commissioner

Sonia Shah is currently the Executive Director of The Sudbury Foundation, a private foundation working to transform lives and strengthen communities through grant making and scholarship programs in Sudbury, MA and surrounding communities. She previously worked as the Director of Development and Outreach at the Natick Service Council, Senior Program Officer at The Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts, Director of Development at MetroWest Legal Services and the Manager of Foundation and Public Service Programs at the Boston Bar Association/Foundation. Sonia holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan and a Juris Doctorate from Northeastern University School of Law. She lives in Natick with her husband, daughter, son, dogs, and cats.