The California Prostitutes Education Project (COYOTE)

Although COYOTE faced many opposing forces, the AIDS epic crisis showed COYOTE’s true commitment to protecting and helping sex worker’s health and well-being. They were able to create social welfare programs and support services that were urgently needed and successful. COYOTE “was one of the earliest feminist organizations to teach safer sex to women and to recommend condoms for protection against disease (Chatesuvert, 2013, p. 86). COYOTE was not only influential in being a leading movement to teach sexual health education, they established the California Prostitutes Education Project (CAL-PEP) in 1985 and the St James Infirmary. The CAL-PEP was created to conduct research on the prevalence of AIDS Among women, it started the first sex-worker
James Infirmary (SJI) is an occupational health and safety clinic that offers holistic models for health services that are run for and by sex workers (COYOTE “wanted to empower sex workers by acknowledging their activities at work and protecting their health through the provision of condoms, counseling, and other support services (Majic, 2014, p. 69). By focusing on a peer model, SJI helps to establish sex workers as an agent who has full control of their own body and gives them skills that they can use in broader context. Both these non-profits were a product of COYOTE, but they rejected the identity politics that COYOTE embraced. These nonprofits changed their tactics by structuring sex workers rights as human rights. By astutely integrated human rights principles into their services in order to fight AIDS and advance COYOTE’s political goals it helped to reframe decriminalization of sex work, and placed sex workers issues at the center of
However, the movement soon after faded, as CAL-PEP and SJI overshadowed the movement itself. In many ways, these non-profits were able to successfully thrive because of they were more socially and ethically acceptable. Nonetheless, CAL-PEP and SJI are very successful nonprofits whose primary concerns are focused on servicing and protecting their constituents’ health, rights, and welfare. However, as non-profits, they are restricted in advancing the rights of their constituents in specific ways as they receive federal grants. Although nonprofit laws and federal funding govern how they can act, CAL-Pep and SJI have strategically been able to challenge laws and policies that disproportionately impact their constituents. “These nonprofits do this through claims-making activities, whereby they negotiate the constraints that nonprofit tax status and funding agreements impose on them to challenge government policy and social-moral order” (Majic, 2014, p. 95). By carefully stating that they are not political and avoid political activities they are able to continue advancing the goals of the movements through the institutional structure. CAL-PEP and SJI are, thus, able to garner long-term social, legal and public policy changes that will improve the health and welfare of sex workers. Overall, they will continue to achieve broader social change as they continue to place