Download Full Legislative Priorities as a PDF

PowHer NY just celebrated its 10th Anniversary in 2025. The PowHer Network, one program of PowHer NY, brings together, through bi-weekly meetings, mutual education and collaborative action, over fifty statewide and regional organizations representing hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who share a commitment to protecting and accelerating inclusive gender justice and economic equality in New York State. 

Our 2026 legislative priorities range across a wide and diverse set of issues and challenges:

• Care Economy – Protecting and expanding access to quality, affordable care across the life span. Recognizing and justly rewarding the valuable work of providing this care for children, people with illnesses, people with disabilities, and older adults; and facilitating the stabilization and expansion of a critical workforce.
• Health And Bodily Autonomy – Ensuring all people have the right and ability to access quality, affordable health care; all women have the right to determine when, whether and how to become a parent.; and all individuals the right to gender affirming care. Expecting mothers should have access to quality, affordable and culturally appropriate maternal care, and the right to give birth in a safe, supportive environment. And the state should ensure the privacy of medical records.
• Equal Pay/Fair Compensation – Ensuring all working people are compensated fairly, with equal compensation for comparable work; and demanding transparency from employers regarding salary ranges and pay rates to strengthen the negotiating power of both employees and applicants.
• Civil Rights for All – Ensuring constitutional law is respected and promoting the dignity and human rights of all.
• Gender Based Violence – Ensuring continued and sustainable funding of domestic violence services. Reaching for preventive policy solutions that ensure the safety of the individual, and avoid recreating the carceral state and injustices that create violence.

This year, in the face of federal attempts to erase and distort our history and pull back progress toward equality, we collectively urge New York leaders to stand strong, address gaps in funding impacting critical services, make whole disrupted and failing systems, and continue moving forward toward opportunity and justice for all – especially for those from low-income, Black, brown, immigrant, and other historically marginalized communities.

We look forward to working with state leaders to address the roadblocks to economic justice and gender equity and to seize opportunities to help all New Yorkers to contribute and thrive. 

To view the full priority list, download here.