We are Project Priceless: a self-determined collective of homeless prostituted women organizing for our survival, self-determination, and feminist liberation. For years, we have survived the unimaginable. We have been bought, sold, jailed, raped, discarded, and disappeared. And yet, we persist—not just to survive, but to build a world in which women are never subjected to these same horrors ever again.

We are raising funds to acquire a permanent building in Worcester to establish a housing cooperative to operate as a women's-only shelter—a home of our own in which all women can seek refuge from male violence, engage in political resistance, and share in collective feminist healing. A place run by and for women who have survived the sex trade and street economies under capitalist patriarchy. A place that refuses the idea that women's lives are disposable!

We call this effort A Home of Our Own, because that is what vulnerable women are systematically deprived of—not just a place to hide from violence, but a place from which to fight back.

✊🏾 The Underscoring Political Line of Our Work

We begin from a political premise: prostitution is neither work nor consensual—it is the organized sexual exploitation of a global underclass of women. Prostitution is a system born of women’s social and economic dispossession, and it thrives on our inability to meet our basic needs: food, housing, safety, community, and love.

We do not understand prostitution as a “job”, but as the logical consequence of our class position as women in world where all women are subjugated to male demands—a sex caste in capitalist patriarchy. What unites us is not individual identity, but our shared material conditions:

Homelessness
Male violence
Childhood and adulthood sexual abuse
Incarceration
Disenfranchisement from the formal economy
And the deep, grinding poverty that comes from being female and unwanted in a society that commodifies our pain.

We are not criminal, pathological, or broken.

Simply put: we are economically coerced into submission, and we are organizing to end that coercion. That means confronting not just male domination, but the entire socioeconomic order that makes our bodies its collateral.

🏡 A Shelter Built on Feminist and Cooperative Principles

We are beginning our fundraising efforts at $25,000 to acquire a building in the city of Worcester to transform into a women-run, women-governed housing cooperative to operate as a feminist shelter.

This will be a first-of-its-kind space in Worcester—a city in which no shelter at all currently exists for single women, we are determined to not create another traditional, hierarchical shelter where women are monitored, managed, and moralized, but instead, a horizontal, cooperative community.

The shelter will be governed democratically by its residents and members, with collective decision-making and deep accountability.
We are incorporating under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 157B, creating a legal cooperative structure to own and manage the space cooperatively, instead of through the traditional CEO-structured ownership of means.

By owning this building together, we are not only stepping out of prostitution—we are stepping into collective ownership and political self-determination to give ourselves and each other the chance to harness the skills of independence by empowering ourselves economically to ensure that we, and all women, are never in the destitute position that was shackling us to the street economy again.

🔧The Progress We've Made Thus Far

Since our From Pain to Power action at Worcester City Hall in December 2024, we have made our needs plain. The city is in crisis, and so are the women on its streets.

We have identified a property in Main South as our ideal building. It is accessible to and accommodating of the growing number of women on the streets, adaptable, and within the very neighborhood where most of us live and survive: Main South. But when we brought this to the city, their response was clear: they did not want us there.

Main South is our home as much as anyone’s. We will not be displaced again. Just like homeowners and the housed, we ALSO want Main South to be safer for women, for children, for all working residents. That does not happen through gentrification or police sweeps. That happens by getting women off the streets and out of prostitution. That happens by ending homelessness, not criminalizing it. That happens when women build power together.

We are fighting not only to house ourselves—but to imagine a world in which prostitution no longer exists. A world in which no woman is forced to sell access to her body just to eat, sleep, and survive one more day. A world in which children can grow up without being groomed into the sex trade under the eyes of a city that looks the other way.

We have done our part. We have shown up. We’ve continued meeting every week—through trauma, through pain, through the entire bitter winter without housing—to file grant applications, fundraise, organize, share, and dream. We have borne witness to the worst this city can do to a human being, and we are still here.

Together.

📊 Worcester’s Shelter Crisis: The Numbers Don’t Lie

1 in 3 women in the United States will experience domestic violence in her lifetime.
In Worcester, homelessness among women is rising rapidly, with many women forced into street economies every single day as a condition of survival. Women all around the world find themselves without housing due to resisting male abuse and getting thrown out—something all women are vulnerable to in a patriarchal society where our livelihood and finances are dependent on men!
All state-funded domestic violence shelters in Massachusetts are at full capacity, every single night.
Emergency shelters operate on lottery systems or waitlists—which means women escaping violent men have nowhere immediate to go.

In such a system, the only people who can protect women are other women.
And that’s exactly what we are doing.

This shelter will be an open door for all women escaping male violence in Worcester. A space for those turned away by a system that sees our safety as optional. A space that doesn’t ask survivors to be perfect, sober, or obedient while trying to survive the horrors of male domination—only that they are ready to be loved, defended, and welcomed.

💸 Our Budget & Strategy

We aim to raise at least $250,000 through:

Grant Funding & Institutional Support (60%)
- $0 incoming from Haymarket People’s Fund --- denied funding
- Applications in progress!
- If at least 60% of the $250,000 budget (~$150,000) is not reached through grants, we are planning on seeking out non-extractive loans.
Grassroots Feminist Fundraising (10%)
- A Home of Our Own capital campaign is seeking to raise 10% of our $250,000 budget ($25,000).
- Feminists for Homeless Women event series! Keep an eye out for our kick-off event to start this regularly occurring fundraising event.
- Feminist Monthly Giving Club where reoccurring donations start at $5 a month and donors will receive quarterly updates, behind-the-scenes photos or podcast episodes, and will be enshrined in an inaugural "Wall of Love" at the shelter when we open.
Direct Negotiation With Seller (10%)
- Working with realtor to negotiate a social impact clause and lease-to-own option with seller with the hopes that we can knock off at least 10% ($25,000) of the value assessment price in our purchase of the property.
- Calling on City of Worcester to uphold commitments made after From Pain to Power through negotiating with seller to sell to us at a conservative price

🌹 A City of Firsts, A Movement Reborn

Worcester is no stranger to female resistance. In 1850, the first National Woman’s Rights Convention was held here, drawing more than a thousand women and men who dared to imagine a world in which women were no longer the property of men. It was a watershed moment in U.S. history—a declaration of independence from the patriarchal order. We rise today in their footsteps—not in museums or textbooks, but in the streets of Main South, in the spirit of that same radical defiance.

At that convention, Lucy Stone declared,

“We want that woman should have her part in the making and shaping of a better world than any we have known.”

We are shaping that better world. But our feminism emerges from a more brutal reality than even those early suffragists could imagine: the reality of mass homelessness, of racialized sexual exploitation, of women sold for sex in a city that once called itself the birthplace of rights. We are prostituted women and street survivors building power together, and we are proud to carry Worcester’s feminist history into the present by organizing toward housing, safety, dignity, and freedom from male violence.

At that same 1850 gathering, Paulina Wright Davis demanded:

“Let us now take our stand. We are a portion of the people—let us claim our share.”

Project Priceless is taking that stand. But we go further. We do not simply claim a share within capitalism or demand inclusion in a world that has always exploited us. We are building a new one—by and for women, especially the poorest and most vulnerable among us. Our shelter will be a housing cooperative, not just a bed to sleep in, but a base of power where women control their own lives and futures. A home of our own.

Just as Worcester was once the spark of a national feminist uprising, it will be again. But this time, the movement is not led by women with status or wealth. It is led by those who have nothing left to lose but each other—and who know that when women organize together, we survive. We fight. We win.

💞 Our Invitation to You

This is the labor of years—of women surviving together, organizing in the face of death, and daring to dream of a world without prostitution.

Now, we are on the edge of something monumental. We are ready to build! But we need your help to cross the threshold.

Donate.
Share our story.
Join our Feminist Monthly Giving Club.
Host a fundraiser.
Be part of our Wall of Love.

This shelter serves as a strategic blow against the political economy of patriarchy right here in the city of Worcester—a space that will house generations of feminist resistance, from the margins to the center.

When women come together, we are unstoppable.

Help us build a home of our own. For our survival. For our freedom. For every woman still out there.

A Home of Our Own: The Project Priceless Women’s Shelter Campaign

A Capital Campaign to Establish a Feminist Shelter For Single Women in the City of Worcester

Team Members