Over the past couple of weeks, pink, rather than green, has been the prevalent color du jour in the financial world. There were pink protests at the Congressional hearings about American International Group (AIG); and pink appearances on stage during Goldman Sachs (GS) Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein’s speech at the Council of Institutional Investors.

While most people know that the pink ladies protesting in the halls of Washington are members of the group CodePink, not much is known about the founders themselves.

The group was formed in 2002 by Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and Gael Murphy, three progressive activists whose original purpose in forming the group was to protest the invasion of Iraq. The name CodePink is a pun, mocking President Bush’s color-coded terrorist threat alert system -- but lately, the group’s mission has evolved from an anti-war effort into an advocacy group for more domestic spending and less Wall Street rescuing.

“The goal was to help stop the war, which didn’t happen,” Benjamin admits. “We’ve worked to stop it, but now we’ve focused on how we can reorganize our government’s resources to move away from a focus on war and lately on Wall Street, and focus instead on health care and education. How do we reorient our priorities to focus on what we call ‘life-affirming activities?”’

Benjamin has had a long career of forming and working with progressive advocacy groups; she founded both CodePink and Global Exchange, a human rights organization promoting international justice. A New York native, she holds Masters degrees from both Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Benjamin currently lives in San Francisco, but is moving mostly to Washington, D.C.

Before her more recent endeavors to, as her bio on the CodePink Web site puts it, “promote a U.S. foreign policy that would respect human rights and gain us allies instead of contributing to violence and undermining our international reputation,” Benjamin ran as a California State Senate candidate for the Green Party in 2000. She has worked to promote free trade and has written eight books a variety of topics from "green" living to a book she co-authored with CodePink founder Jodie Evans on, "Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism."

Evans has also made a career of laboring for various progressive causes. She has worked in a multitude of organizations focusing on everything from the International Overseas Education Fund to People for Parks. Evans also worked as a campaign administrator for Jerry Brown, who made three unsuccessful attempts for the nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate. 

Evans and Benjamin had met through various events and advocacy groups and were together, protesting the war in Iraq, when the idea to form CodePink struck them in 2002. Evans says the group has become her life ever since. She said even though she and Benjamin had never worn pink much before the group's formation, she thinks there is something special about the color pink and believes it is central to the group’s identity.

"There is something about pink -- it's disarming, it makes you smile,” Evans said. “We want to be disarming when delivering the message, when pointing at the elephant in the room.”

Murphy, CodePink’s third founder, has had an active career in public service. She started out working in the Peace Corps and then got into public health. She’s worked as a public health officer in Zaire and in Central America, a foreign service officer and an aid contractor. Murphy said she saw first-hand how America’s public policy wasn’t being used appropriately.

“As an American citizen, we have a certain responsibility,” Murphy said. “A responsibility not to prop up dictators -- so I became less and less enchanted with the idea of being a foreign service officer and felt more and more I needed to get involved in foreign policy work."

Murphy knew Evans from another group she had worked with and got involved with this organization after helping to coordinate the CodePink-sponsored Women’s Peace Vigil held across from the White House in 2002. Murphy now heads up the group’s D.C. office.

While the group still opposes the military presence in the Middle East and is adamant in its desire to see President Obama trim the Pentagon’s budget and reallocate those resources toward health care and education, these days CodePink has a new target on which to focus its ire. 

In late 2008, as the federal government aimed a massive bailout package at Wall Street, the founding women of CodePink worried that a bailout of the banking system could undermine the funding of social programs as much as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"When we heard about the bailout, after having been manipulated into war by fear-mongering, we thought, 'we know this game, we’ve seen this before' and it was the same pattern and the same bulls--t," Evans said. "Why would we want to bail out banks? These are they guys that made the trouble. Here we are all worried about a war, and nobody’s paying attention to the store."

Murphy maintains that the group’s objectives now are not much different than they were initially.

“I think something that has never left us is this idea that in than invading Iraq and spending $650 billion… we lost huge opportunities to strengthen our own economy and security,” Murphy said. “Now our resources are being diverted from our domestic needs to cover the behinds of failed managers.”

What’s most interesting is that suddenly, CodePink finds itself on the same side as many of the war-supporting Republican legislators it has lobbied against for years, a fact which none of the founders see as surprising. CodePink fiercely maintains itself a nonpartisan group.

"It was a little strange when that first bailout didn’t pass, because we were giving high-fives to a whole host of conservatives," Benjamin said. “We were all so happy when that first vote failed.”

None of the founders know if they’ll be able to change Washington’s approach to financial crisis, but they’re certainly not about to give up any time soon.

“Right now people are confused about where to focus their anger,” Benjamin said. “I think as the months go by it will become clear that Congress is not helping, that the people that Obama has put in charge of the economy are people that come from the same toxic environment on Wall Street that caused the problem and then hopefully we’ll began demanding some real change.”

Until then, the women of CodePink see it as their duty to ensure that Congress sees the public’s opposition to their decisions, as well as making certain Wall Street’s bankers feel the weight of their actions. 

The women are not afraid to be bold about getting their message across. Benjamin and another member of the group got on stage during Blankfein’s speech at the Council of Institutional Investors last week and told him, “we want our money back.” According to the latest polls, many people agree with what CodePink is saying, even if they don’t agree with their methods.

Evans defends the group’s actions against criticism from legislators like Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who admonished CodePink during the AIG hearings.

“We haven't behaved in ways that everyone finds appropriate since day one," Evans said. “It is this structure of behaved society that allows this destruction to take place -- look at Wall Street -- it’s all prim and proper and look where that got us.”