A new group in Federal Way wants to make sure the community is informed about political issues that could affect their lives in the November general election.

The group calls itself SWEEP, which stands for “Suburban Women – Engaged, Empowered, and Pissed.” It is a local version of a national group hosted by Red, Wine and Blue that started in 2016. The national group also has a podcast called “The Suburban Women Problem.”

Federal Way’s SWEEP group said their main focus is on educating people about Project 2025. This project includes a detailed list of policy changes for the next president to enact, and builds off the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership.” Many points of this mandate were adopted and implemented by the Trump Administration while he was in office, according to the group. A point by point of which policies were adopted at that time can be found here.

The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank, and the Mandate for Leadership received contributions by over 100 conservative groups.

Federal Way’s SWEEP group members plan to share information about the policy changes in this document in any way they can, including writing letters and sign-waving on Pacific Highway South. They also attended a recent coffee hour hosted by State Rep. Kristine Reeves (D-District 30) to share their concerns with her.

Reeves has been hosting Coffee with Kristine since 2016, and said she appreciates the opportunity to make space for people with differing opinions to connect. On July 23, she said other community members who were not involved in SWEEP also brought up Project 2025 before that group arrived.

“I want to make sure that these coffee hours are structured in such a way that people feel safe, bringing up alternative points of view, so that folks understand that our community is not a monolith,” she said.

At Tuesday’s meeting, one constituent shared her support of some points in Project 2025, including privatization of schools.

Reeves said that she thanked her for being vulnerable and “sharing that opinion that isn’t going to be popular with everybody at this table. I said to everybody else, what we’re not going to do is demonize her for having a different opinion…What we are going to do is listen to what that’s rooted in. And what I really heard her saying was, look, I’m living paycheck to paycheck right now, there are obligations that I’m paying for that if I wasn’t paying for those things, I would have more money in my pocket.”

Karen Brugato and Lana Bostic are members of the Federal Way SWEEP group and said there are many policy demands in the Mandate for Leadership that will have an impact on their lives personally, or on people in Federal Way, if implemented.

“I think that sometimes we get used to living in a blue state. We have a lot of rights, we have easy voting, we have abortion, but if this happens, we’re not going to get out of it because we’re in a blue state,” Bostic said.

Brugato and Bostic both said one catalyst for the group’s creation was a live Zoom call hosted by Red, Wine and Blue on July 15 attended by over 30,000 people from all over the country. The call featured Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who went over some context and explanation of Project 2025. The call also included suggestions on how to spread awareness in home communities.

While this effort refers to national agendas, Brugato said the issues that concern her are very relevant to the Federal Way community. She and Bostic mentioned reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, Social Security, Medicare, immigration and education.

“The thing that’s so interesting about this moment is that the vast majority of Americans — whether there’s a D by their name or an I or an R — don’t want the extremism that is currently represented by Trump and the MAGA Republicans,” Richardson said on the call. “This is the moment when we figure out how to work together and say … I might disagree with you about immigration, I might disagree with you about debt, I might disagree with you about different kinds of education, but I can agree that the guardrails of our democracy need to stay in place so we can have these discussions, and I don’t want to have a dictator.”

Bostic echoed that sentiment: “Truthfully we are not saying you need to vote for (Kamala) Harris and not for (Donald) Trump, we just want people to know (about Project 2025).”

Reeves said that at the end of the day, “that’s just the work that I’m trying to instill in community is that instead of pointing the finger at people and saying, ‘Oh, you’re a Democrat, you must think this way,’ or, ‘Oh, you’re a Republican, you must think this way.’ Take a few minutes to really understand and lead with curiosity.”

After she won election in 2016, Reeves said, “I woke up knowing that 49% of people had not voted for me, but I still had to represent them … I had to represent the guy who called me the N-word on his front porch … it is still my job to listen.”

When it comes to Project 2025 specifically, Reeves said she is most concerned about policies that would impact union members and veterans’ benefits, along with a policy to require all public school students to take military entrance exams.

“I represent a very large veterans and military families population,” she said, and reduction in benefits for veterans would mean that “our elders who signed up to do the hard work of serving our country to preserve our freedoms, are now having those earned benefits stripped from them. What a slap in the face, in my opinion.”

Bostic graduated high school the year before Roe v. Wade was passed, and said she doesn’t want to go back to what that time was like.

“I knew people in high school who had gone places and had had abortions and they were scary and risky,” she said. “I don’t want to see that go backwards. I don’t want to live in the ‘50s again.”

The 2025 Mandate for Leadership includes the word abortion 199 times and has several suggestions, including ending any Medicaid dollars for Planned Parenthood, which provides a variety of other health services aside from abortion care. It also proposes a system to track extensive and detailed information about every miscarriage and abortion in order to discourage people to seek abortion care in another state.

When thinking about the future of the country and the Federal Way community, Reeves said she encourages people to sit down and think about their top values that matter to them in their lives and for their community, then look for those values within the platforms of both sides to really educate themselves on what is being offered.

“Regardless of the political spectrum … it is a bipartisan issue to ask, how do we make life more affordable? How do we build an economy that works best for everyone?” Reeves said.

She encouraged people to listen to each other and be curious enough to find common ground.

“When we can find that agreement,” Reeves said, “it is more likely that we’re going to be able to keep moving toward an agenda that builds shared prosperity for all of us and protects all of our freedoms.”