Grab Your Wallet Alliance

Grab Your Wallet's recent major programs include (1) the Force the Issue campaign (2) the Grab Your Wallet campaign and (3) a rapid-response COVID related effort. In 2019, the Force the Issue campaign launched as an effort to get 900 large publicly traded companies to end the practice of requiring forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims as a condition of employment-a practice that inadvertently silences victims of harassment and protects serial harassers. The Force the Issue campaign secured the support of more than 40 institutional investor groups representing $54 billion in managed assets and received media coverage in the Washington Post, CBS News, Quartz and several other media outlets. In 2020, the Force the Issue database expanded to include an additional 2,600 publicly traded companies. The nonprofit's second major program in recent years, the Grab Your Wallet campaign, was designed and implemented to demonstrate the purchasing power of women and to give fair minded people a peaceful and impactful way to protest the serial targeting of marginalized people in the United States including women, immigrants, and communities of color. A real-time listing of companies gave citizens a way to reach out to powerful institutions and respectfully encourage them to reframe business practices that harmed marginalized people. This campaign's hashtag was viewed a billion times on social media and over 70 companies made the requested changes. Media coverage of Grab Your Wallet included The New York Times, NPR, BBC, CNN, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vogue, Glamour, and Nightline. The nonprofit's third major program occurred in 2020 and was a COVID-related rapid response program that advocated for the safety and dignity of essential workers. At the peak of the pandemic, thousands of workers reached out to Grab Your Wallet with various advocacy related requests. These requests related almost exclusively to the policies of their employers, some of whom workers felt were unnecessarily endangering their safety. One example is that during the early days of the pandemic, some employers were not permitting their employees to wear a mask, fearing it would scare customers. In all cases, our nonprofit worked directly with employers to make them aware of public health guidelines and ensure the safety of workers. Our outreach centered around employers' mask-related policies, paid leave-related policies, testing related policies, the availability of cleaning & sanitation supplies, essential versus nonessential business designations, and promotional event-related plans and policies among others.