We Engage - Thank You

We Engage would like to thank everyone who followed, donated and supported We Engage and the Pink House Defenders. We are eternally grateful to you; your support made We Engage possible.

However, We Engage is officially going on “permanent hiatus” and closing the organization as a 501c3.

We Engage is honored to have been able to support the patients and providers at Jackson Women’s Health Organization, aka the Pink House, in Jackson, Mississippi.

We Engage is also honored to have played a role in fighting for our right to abortion, to autonomy, to be free of religious intrusion into our private health decisions.

Thank you to all the Defenders, to our allies, and to everyone that supported us, we are eternally grateful.

From We Engage co-founder Derenda Hancock:

“After nearly 5 years it seems that We Engage has run its course. While there have been some disappointments along the way, there were victories as well. 

When we founded We Engage, there were only two clinic escort teams (to our knowledge) that regularly engaged with anti-choice protesters: The Pink House Defenders and the Huntsville, AL escorts.

One of our main goals was to show the public (and fellow escort teams) what responsible engagement looked like and to encourage other escort teams to do the same while always keeping patients first. If you’ve checked out Tik Tok in the last couple of years you can see that engagement is the new norm. 

No, engaging didn’t save abortion access. It did let antis know we weren’t “going down without a fight.” And it gave the public a chance to see how to “push back” responsibly. For us…that was a big win!

We Engage organized and protested Operation Save America (OSA) at 3 of their national conferences over the years. In 2020, We Engage confronted Free The States in Oklahoma at one of the largest gatherings (1,000+) of “abortion abolitionists” to date. We publicized these events to show the public not only how the antis behave, but that when you show up, you CAN make a difference. 

But with Dobbs, circumstances have changed. With Kim being in another state and funding being so sparse, we’ve sadly made the decision to close down We Engage. Fundraising was never something we were good at.

While We Engage is grateful for the states that still have access, Mississippi is a “done deal” and there is little to nothing we can do here, even if we did have the resources. 

We plan to keep the Pink House Defender’s social media and YouTube pages “alive”. The Pink House and the Defenders should NOT be forgotten. The We Engage website will remain online as long as it can be supported.

We want to thank all of you who supported We Engage. It meant so much to the Pink House Defenders to know that y’all cared. And a HUGE thank you to all the Defenders!

We Engage never had grants or sponsors so everything we were able to do was thanks to YOU, our supporters! 

So, thank you for the support and thank you for the memories.

Fund abortion, and keep fighting, y’all! ❤️”