Women Healing Empowering Women

Who We Are

In 1994, Busi L. Peters-Maughan, MS traveled to Nairobi, Kenya as an educator, came back to America as an entrepreneur, and founded Sikawaida Imports, an import/export company, featuring its premiere line of the Drum Bag – designed by Ms. Peters-Maughan for the Yatta Division Women’s Group in Machakos, Kenya. She became motivated to work with the group after witnessing rural Kenyans’ lack of basic necessities like adequate water supplies, electricity, and educational facilities for their children.

Upon returning home to the United States, she turned her attention to the plight of women of color in her own backyard. Women of color are the fastest growing demographic of incarcerated individuals and are facing many adversities like unemployment and insufficient housing upon their release from prison. These two barriers create a lethal combination that contributes to the vicious cycle of recidivism.

This desire to serve marginalized women in Africa and the United States led Ms. Peters-Maughan to create Women Healing & Empowering Women (WHEW), a nonprofit organization, with a local and global focus, incorporated in 2005.

WHEW initially developed through the volunteered expertise of a few women who live in the Third Ward section of Houston, Texas (Harris County) and who shared the common goal of improving the lives of disadvantaged women of color. The State of Texas, and Harris County in particular, has the highest rate of incarceration in the world–and is home to one of the highest recidivism rates in the nation. Many brainstorming sessions began with women sharing sustenance and solutions to the problems that face recently

One of WHEW’s core members, Iesha Haywood, a local and international activist, is now president in charge of WHEW’s start-up satellite in Atlanta, Georgia. Ms. Haywood has been an activist for sentencing reform in Texas and has worked in the intimate partner anti-violence movement for over ten years.