Project Priceless

A Women’s Liberation Collective Takes Root in Main South, Worcester, MA.

According to its executive board, Project Priceless “exists to support the survival and the struggle for liberation of all women subjected to prostitution through homelessness and addiction in the city of Worcester.” Project Priceless was formed in September 2023, following the closure of the only women’s-only shelter in the city of Worcester (SEI overnight shelter).* Project Priceless meets once a week to organize around our social problems as one of the most oppressed classes of people in Worcester. We are dedicated to the liberation of all women. We are leaders in our community. We take the initiative to make the world a better and safer place for ourselves.”

*The Safe Exit Initiative (formerly known as LIFT), still runs a drop-in center, organizes comprehensive policy initiatives, and remains committed to “empowerment, transformation, and the pursuit of a world free from the harms of the sex trade.” (source: https://safeexitinitiative.org/)

Step 1: Follow Project Priceless on their Instagram: instagram.com/project.priceless

Step 2: Check out PP’s Informative One-Pager

Step 3: Deeper Dive

Mission

Project Priceless exists to support the survival and the struggle for liberation of all women subjected to prostitution through homelessness and addiction in the city of Worcester.

Vision

The work of Project Priceless will empower a destitute and marginalized class of women to hold and develop power in the city of Worcester. Our vision is to legitimize the struggle for women’s liberation from the state-sanctioned markets that commercialize women’s bodies and to expose the failures of legal reforms to address the subordinate civil and class status of all women to male dominance.

Goals

  • To develop a social network of female survivors of prostitution to build unity, better ourselves, and feel less alone in the struggle through the collaboration of resources.
  • To defend and protect one another from male violence inflicted by strangers, boyfriends, cops, and johns.
  • To help develop an empowering and pervasive women’s-only space for all members to thrive and achieve her individual goals. We hope to open a women’s shelter!
  • To support our members embracing difficult conversations with vulnerability and empathy to reduce the harms that are intrinsic to surviving prostitution.
  • To increase and maintain visibility as an exploited people in the feminist and class struggles.
  • To liberate all women as a class of people owned and exploited for our sexual, domestic, and reproductive labor.

Values and Principles

Dignity: Upholding the right of all women to be respected, appreciated, and celebrated, especially for our labor.

Teamwork: We recognize that none of us are free until all of us are free. We cannot struggle effectively to achieve our revolutionary goals by taking opportunistic advantage of the social network we’re developing. We share in the work equally.

Community Organizing: Empowering prostituted women to be heard and to be respected as a vital constituency of the city of Worcester. We are hopeful to build solidarity with other revolutionary organizations in the city of Worcester.

Accountability: We are committed to not only holding male power accountable for its crimes against women, but we are also committed to holding each other accountable to remaining steadfast in the struggle.

Consciousness Raising: Equipping all women with the theoretical artillery required to overcome and abolish the social and material conditions that shackle prostituted women as an underclass of people for male society and the state to exploit, brutalize, and rape.

Happiness: We recognize the misery inflicted on prostituted women and are committed to creating moments of joy and gratitude with one another, despite violent oppression.

Membership

Project Priceless is a self-organized, centralized democracy led by and for homeless prostituted women, consisting of a general membership that is overseen by an executive board.

Commitment

Membership is reviewed on a monthly basis by the executive board to present for vote to the general membership. We are exclusively recruiting members that are committed to the goals and vision of Project Priceless. While we’d love to be able to provide women on the streets with consistent money to avoid having to go on dates just to eat, rest, or get off E, unfortunately, we are working with a very tight budget and limited resources. We have already grieved four members since starting Project Priceless and have no more time to waste to build our movement. Please show up ready to organize and fight for a better world!

Step 4: Read PP’s Full Statement Regarding the DOJ’s report on their investigation of the Worcester Police Department:

Step 5: Looking Back

As a poltiical force, Project Priceless has carried out a series of actions to defend

The “RMVillage” Encampment of January 2024

Official PP Statement Regarding the RMVillage Encampment and the City’s Response:

The organizing of RMVillage was a self-determined solution to our struggles: homelessness, prostitution, misogyny and gendered violence, domestic abuse, addiction, institutional violence and inadequacy … “

Project Priceless Board of Legends

Project Priceless is a Main South collective of exclusively women and girls surviving the sex trade. Project Priceless formed following the closure of the only women’s-only shelter in the city of Worcester. The closure of this shelter resulted in the displacement of over a dozen women who were forcibly returned to the vulnerability of spending all day and all night out on the streets, right before the start of the winter season (September 2023). This displacement was a devastation to the autonomy of women surviving the street economy, who now found ourselves subjugated to the demands of the men around us just to survive. Women whose realities are ultimatums of being assaulted just to be able to get out of the cold for a night or get a bite of food! Homeless women experience sexual violence at the hands of boyfriends, cops, and johns. We do not have a single safe space for ourselves, to be able to watch each other’s backs and keep each other safe on our terms. Co-ed shelters, especially ones that only accommodate a few women at a time, expose women to the dangers of men, systemic discrimination, and lack of security due constant displacement. Women may avoid utilizing shelters for the entirety of her years of experiencing homelessness because our belongings will go missing otherwise, we don’t have the assurance of a consistent bed, we have our privacy violated through searches and seizures, we have experienced trauma that is triggering, we are immunocompromised, we are forced to dangerous levels of cold turkey sobriety, we cannot be locked in a building that we’re not allowed to leave after checking-in, and many more reasons. 

The organizing of RMVillage was a self-determined solution to our struggles: homelessness, prostitution, misogyny and gendered violence, domestic abuse, addiction, institutional violence and inadequacy, etc. RMVillage was both a tangible response to increasingly dangerous circumstances (sleeping outside in the winter snow while trying to evade harm) and a politicized statement regarding the lack of accessibility to homelessness services in the city of Worcester. The eviction of RMVillage, just 20 hours into our set up, was incredibly violent and unnecessary. 

The mission of the South Middlesex Opportunity Council (SMOC), the organization that was employed to run the emergency winter shelter at the old RMV site, states that they “will improve equity, wellness and quality of life for diverse individuals and families by providing advocacy, education, and a wide range of services; building a community of support and inclusion; and creating awareness to combat poverty through partnerships and coalitions with other organizations”. SMOC had every opportunity to “improve the equity, wellness, and quality of life” of people experiencing homelessness that they were unable to initially accommodate in the shelter, by supporting and partnering, like they claim they do, with a self-organized women’s liberation collective that has been addressing and combating poverty, which encompasses the struggles of homelessness, the war on drugs, and the commodification of women’s bodies. Not to mention, SMOC employees have explicitly used transmisogynistic violence to intimidate, harass, traumatize, and exclude women. 

This parking lot is literally empty and unused by SMOC. We were not interfering with SMOC’s ability to run the shelter; if anything, we were a resource available for all the folks that SMOC was unable to accommodate. We had tents, tarps, blankets, food, clothing, heat sources, etc available for anybody who needed it. Even if every Project Priceless member accepted a bed inside of SMOC that day, they would still be leaving hundreds of people to freeze outside. We are not like y’all. We do not abandon our friends or turn people away.

SMOC and the city of Worcester used police violence to intimidate us into leaving the encampment for hours. Dozens of cops called to force homeless women to scatter into alleys and traps, where we are arrested for being at anyway. There is nowhere to go! We are harassed everywhere! Our clear demand was to let us stay, to let us keep our safe communal space.

City Manager Batista said he was “disappointed in the events that unfolded, as occurrences such as these make the existing obstacles around emergency housing even more challenging”. Has Batista considered asking US about what we think is the solution to OUR problems? No. The city chose to intentionally arrest people not experiencing homelessness as to create a division between “homeless individuals” and “activists”, as if WE were not putting OURSELVES in the line of struggle, advocating for OUR survival and needs. WE are activists who autonomously appointed people who are in solidarity with us to join us in our advocacy. We are smart and capable women. We never needed saving, like SMOC and the city of Worcester continues to believe. We can take care of ourselves! As evidenced by our survival through the most devastating traumas anybody in this city can even imagine. We demand that our agency be respected.

We are also the only reason SMOC even opened more beds in the shelter anyway. We made your job easier, actually.

To follow Project Priceless’ Journey follow them on instagram (@project.priceless) and reach out to priceless@worcesteryouthcoops.org