Angelina Perri Birney — PURE VISION Changing the World

                  The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. -- Toni Morrison

Angelina Perri Birney

With women’s movements around the world on the rise, one must ask a fundamental question: What’s missing from our political, economic, social and educational systems that needs fixing? As the author of this blog, Powerful Women Changing the World, I have interviewed many women, prominent in their fields — Marie C. Wilson of The White House Project, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau of eTalk, Almas Jiwani of UN Women Canada, and Madeline Di Nonno of the Geena Davis Institute, among them — who have all expressed the obvious. The lack of women in leadership roles means a waste of talent, skill, and insight.

I would like to deepen this perspective a bit further. Feminine power has been disregarded and that negligence has led to the imbalance we’re collectively experiencing. We see it everywhere — in religious institutions, government policies, business sectors and peace initiatives. Somewhere along the line we have gotten confused, believing that a masculine approach is stronger and will guarantee the attainment of our goals. But experience informs us otherwise. Many so-called “victories” have been short-lived and we find ourselves in fruitless cycles, using some form of aggression or dominance to resolve our difficulties. Without properly regarding the feminine we ultimately lose, no matter how often or how hard we fight. It’s only when the masculine and the feminine work together that we can reach any sane or lasting solutions. That’s why it’s so important for men, as well as women, to accept, respect and confirm that which is feminine in themselves so the issue of feminine power doesn’t become a women vs. men type of thing, but rather a blending that is beneficial to both. With that perspective, the uplifting of women around the globe is not a threatening issue, but one that is empowering to all.

In my novel, PURE VISION, feminine power is revealed as the driving force necessary to change the world and balance out the more masculine energies we’ve been predominantly working with. The book has a unique storyline, weaving myth, history, and political intrigue. It also introduces a strong and powerful female character, Maggie Seline, who is persecuted for of her beliefs. My husband, Lawrence, and I began writing the book ten years ago, and it metamorphosized dramatically along the way. There’s plenty of unexpected twists to the plot, so it’s entertaining, and yet at the same time, it really inspires you to think and envision something greater. PURE VISION sets you on an adventure — women from all over the world march toward creating an international peace zone — so plenty of action against a backdrop of current and historical events.

I’ve also been asked what inspired me to write this particular story. So much of the conflict we’re seeing around the world makes you stop and think about how we can all make a difference. When I hear about and see people hurt by the ravages of war, there’s a part of me that knows I can’t just bury my head in the sand. In my own case, I know I can communicate a story in an entertaining way and be able to reach a wide audience. So that’s how it started. I felt the need to express powerful ideals in a way that gave everyone room to think. When I actually began writing, I was inspired by the stories of great leaders — men and women such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia — who stood against all odds because they had a vision of peace and decency.

There’s also a real need in the world for strong women characters, both in everyday life and in fiction. I believe PURE VISION fulfills that need by providing an intelligent, resourceful, larger-than-life female protagonist who is a force to be reckoned with. On a grander scale, I believe the novel recognizes that feminine energy must to be embraced — whether we’re male or female — in order to create a more balanced world. The story also creates a space where we can look at our problems in a new light. Instead of using old, worn-out methods like political divides and military force to attain resolution, we need to include spiritual or higher-minded means in our efforts.

Art is such a powerful tool and artists are always using it to create change. My hope is that PURE VISION makes its mark and transforms readers, inspiring them to support an ideal beyond division and blame — a vision of peace.

PURE VISION: The Magdalene Revelation

If you thrive on unraveling mysteries and discovering threatening secrets like those found in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, then Pure Vision is a must read. The novel’s additional ingredient of social conscience and an ending that stimulates readers to create a new paradigm makes it all the more powerful and explosive — a contemporary statement meant to move you out of your mind and onto the street.

Available from: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple iTunes

Author’s Website: perribirney.com

Genre:  Fiction, Action/Adventure, Thriller

Reviews:

“A thrill ride in the vein of The Da Vinci Code but with a much larger vision for all of us. The alchemy is part historic fiction, part spiritual adventure, and a variety of interfaith metaphysics that metamorphosize into a golden vision of world peace . . . a page turner.” – Paul Hertel, Whole Living

“Presents a fascinating story full of intrigue and history. Birney’s fiction seamlessly blends science and religion into a tale worthy of Indiana Jones . . . The book left this reader confident that idealism is not dead and that, sometimes, it can be the road map by which we might save ourselves. – Cynthia Warren, Daily Freeman

“Birney infuses this epic novel with feminine echoes of The Da Vinci Code and The Red Tent, with her eyes on the prize of world peace. Reporter Maggie Seline courts controversy by championing an international Jerusalem . . . when she disappears women around the globe march for peace . . . powerful men vie for two ancient artifacts.” – Chronogram

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With a Master’s degree in English Education from NYU and a B.A. in Writing and Communications, Angelina Perri Birney has also been trained in the Tibetan Buddhist lama tradition and completed a three-year retreat. While traveling extensively throughout Tibet, Nepal and India, she experienced the rich cultures and spiritual traditions practiced in these lands. She received teachings on the various myths explored within Pure Vision, in particular that of Shambhala, from several eminent teachers including the Dalai Lama. Angelina is also an alumna of the White House Project, an organization which promotes women’s advancement and leadership. In addition to her blog, Powerful Women Changing the World, Angelina’s work has also been published in the McGraw-Hill anthology, Women: Images and Realities (2011).

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SOPHIE GRÉGOIRE-TRUDEAU: Awakening the Heart of Human Rights

               The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.                                     — Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau

Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau is literally a force of nature. She brings a heart-centered approach to every arena of her life, from her marriage to Justin Trudeau, a liberal member of the Canadian Parliament and son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, to raising her two children, to being a social activist, right through to her position as Quebec correspondent for eTalk, Canada’s most-watched entertainment news program.

Listening to her speak, one can’t help but think she has a natural flair for connecting with people, especially to women and girls, who readily respond to the openness and transparency she offers. Sophie immediately demonstrates her willingness to be straightforward, speaking about her struggles as well as what brought her to the different aspects of her path as an advocate and a reporter.

“To make a long story short, I’m an only child,” Sophie states. “I was brought up in a very loving family and I was fortunate to have a privileged upbringing. We weren’t millionaires, not at all, but we never lacked anything and we led a good life. My parents sent me to camp and paid for my travels and studies, so and I was very well cared for. I’m still very close to them, and they’re also amazing grandparents. Yet, obviously, everyone has their own struggles and I had mine. In my teenage years, I was faced with dealing with an eating disorder, which of course was an illness, but it was also a symptom of greater wounds. And as any other teenager who is dealing with building a notion of self, I was having difficulty building mine when it came to who I was, why I was here, and what my place was in this world.”

As an only child, Sophie mentions feeling a special kind of pressure. “You are trying to answer to so many things that are asked of you and you’re trying to perform. I know I wanted to be good at everything. I did well in school and sports and tended to be a perfectionist. Actually, I was asking way too much of myself.”

Sophie notes that adolescence is a time, especially for girls, when bonding and intimate relationships are at the core of building self esteem. She recognizes that her desire to excel compensated for a deeper need to connect. “It’s very important to have a good social network. When I struggled for years with an eating disorder, I knew very well what I was suffering from. Every time I was into binging and purging, I was really feeling isolated in my mind and deep down somewhere in my soul. Today, as a thirty-six year old woman, and now a mother of two, I understand that I was looking for something deeper back then — for my place in the world. I had wanted to pack my bags, and just travel and explore,” she says laughing, “but obviously, you have to go to school, and there are rules to follow. But what I really wanted to do was connect with human beings.”

Raised by parents who were always sensitive to the suffering of others had its effect. Sophie mentions that even at a young age she naturally extended herself to children who were lonely or being taunted. “My parents always said I had a tender heart. And today, I’m married to someone who’s like that, too. My husband, Justin, and I are both moved easily. We know how fortunate we are, and that it comes with a responsibility. I also felt at a young age — although I couldn’t put my finger it — that I had to do something greater. Not just for me,” Sophie says, pausing to reassess, “but you know, actually it was for me — for me to become the person that I wanted to become. But when you’re a teenager, that’s all blurry, which is normal.”

After studying Commerce at McGill University and attaining a BA in Communications from the Université de Montréal, Sophie worked in advertising and sales for several years before deciding to redirect her course. “I was not finding my place in that world, and I wasn’t feeling happy in my jobs. At one point, I decided to go to radio and television school because I had a gift for sharing information and for speaking to people. So I went to school and did very well. I landed my first job as a journalist in a newsroom, writing the ticker — the news you see at the bottom of the screen. I worked night shifts and it was actually a cool job. Being in the newsroom was exciting — you’re in touch with what’s happening around the world so it was all very interesting. And then, a couple of months later, there was an opening for a cultural entertainment reporter on the same channel. I was called in to audition, and I got the job.”

Being a media personality provided Sophie with an additional opportunity to connect with people, but now on a much grander scale. Literally having a voice that could reach millions of viewers, Sophie disclosed she had struggled with an eating disorder. “I remembered journalists asking me, ‘Have you ever had a problem with your body image?’ When I actually told the Quebec and the Canadian public that I had suffered from an eating disorder, the response was so amazing. At first, some people would ask, ‘Were you completely insane when you came out with that? Didn’t you wonder what people would think?’ And to be honest with you, No. Because I knew that so many of my friends and so many girls that I didn’t know were suffering. And from that point, it became a snowball effect. I started giving speeches and being invited to host events. And as more time passed, I really started to invest myself in women’s issues.”

As Sophie notes, she moved into advocacy work as a matter of course. “I didn’t wake up one morning saying, ‘Okay, now I’m going to do this.’ It just came naturally. I started to get more and more requests to speak. What really struck me was the response I received when I met people after a speech, and how the women — mothers, aunts, grandmothers — came up to me with tears in their eyes and shared their stories. It just all made sense. The message became loud and clear: This is what you have to do.”

Telling her own story was just the beginning. The open doorway Sophie provided, allowing people insight into her personal struggles, proved to be the passage she used to venture out into the world, acting as a voice for women and children in need.

One journey that was especially moving for Sophie was the trip she took to Ethiopia in 2006 with her mother-in-law Margaret Trudeau, Honorary President of WaterCan, a leading Canadian charity dedicated to fighting global poverty by helping the world’s poorest people gain access to clean water, basic sanitation and hygiene education. Their life-changing venture was captured in the CTV documentary, A Window Opens: Margaret and Sophie in Ethiopia.

As Sophie explains, the trip to Ethiopia with WaterCangave her further insight into the difficulties people were facing. “I had been to Africa and had seen suffering,” Sophie remarks, “but not in the way that I did in Ethiopia. We traveled through the country with WaterCan, an organization which among other things, builds wells and brings clean water to remote regions in Africa. When we were traveling, we stayed with families for many hours during the day, and we saw that women were actually victims of the water problem more than men. That’s because they’re the ones who usually fetch the water and put their lives in danger, walking miles and miles and sometimes meeting up with violence. Little children are also walking way too far and are involved in accidents. So once again, when it comes to basic human rights, women and children are often the first ones to pay.”

Sophie has also lent her voice to a number of other initiatives, including being a spokesperson for Shield of Athena, an organization which operates therapeutic services for women and children who are victims of domestic abuse and violence. Among their services, they provide emergency housing and offer a safe and empowering environment, employing social workers, educators and cultural intermediaries who offer multilingual services. In addition, Sophie encourages girls’ activism through Girls for the Cure, a student-led initiative of young girls from six independent Montreal-area schools — Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s School, Queen of Angels Academy, Sacred Heart School of Montreal, The Study, Trafalgar School for Girls and Villa Maria — who work together to make a difference in their communities. They offer a Student Scholarship Program which allows young women of participating schools the opportunity to develop projects focused on philanthropy, volunteerism and education. “In September, Girls for the Cure [watch the 2010 CTV video] will be doing an amazing event where thousands of girls will be uniting on Mount Royal Summit in Montreal,” Sophie informs. “They’ll be walking to raise awareness for women-related cancers and research.”

As Sophie clearly indicates, women’s issues are of primary importance to her, both in Canada and around the globe. She points out that even today, in 2011, over sixty million girls cannot lay claim to basic human rights, including access to education or personal safety. “When you think deeply about it, women today are being raped, violated, coerced into the sex trade, and humiliated for one reason — and for one reason only — because they’re women. That is unacceptable. And we’re paying the price worldwide since nations are becoming impoverished because women cannot fully participate. Obviously, there are some regions in the world where this problem is extreme, like in China and India, where we’re talking gendercide and infanticide with regard to girls. The situation is quite alarming. If you read the facts and know what’s going on out there, there’s no way that you’re not going to be touched by all of this, especially if you’re a woman.”

At the same time, Sophie acknowledges the importance of men’s participation regarding women’s rights. Respecting women and focusing on their empowerment does not represent a ‘women against men’ issue, but rather only helps to create a balanced approach to human rights in all sectors of life. “Each time I get to address an audience, and I see the men that attend these events, I always thank them because without them, without all of us holding hands together, where are we going to go with all this?”

As Sophie indicates, more men need to advocate for girls and women in order to turn the tide. “Unfortunately, when we talk about these problems, about gendercide and crimes against girls and women, especially within some regions of the world, these extreme actions have often been led by men. Obviously, there have been some instances, especially with regard to female genital mutilation, where it’s a vicious cycle. Women who have not known anything else actually encourage young girls and other women to get that sort of thing done.”

Nonetheless, the pendulum has been stuck on the side of patriarchy a bit too long. There’s no doubt that it’s an unbalanced paradigm, with disregard for the feminine creating its own deficit problem.

“I truly believe humanity is facing a huge imbalance between the male and female energies,” Sophie asserts. “We have disrespected, in such a deep way, the womb of humanity — women — and we are paying the price right now on all levels. We’re even seeing it in our pop culture. It’s so in our faces that it’s kind of hidden at the same time, because we’ve become accepting of it. Talking with young girls, I realize that there’s a culture of self-hatred that really has been rampant, and it’s actually normal to hate yourself when you’re a teenager today. That’s unacceptable. That is why we have to address these issues, and we have to do it locally, one baby step at a time.”

And those baby steps have led to much bigger strides. As Sophie travels have informed her, more and more women are coming to the fore around the globe, supporting one another and advocating for their basic human rights. “There are women’s movements all over the world, including in the poorest regions and places where women have not had a political voice,” Sophie states. “I think that’s because we’re in an era of information. These women now have more of the facts and they realize this is not right. So as much as in Canada as abroad, I think that these little cells of women, of energy, are feeling one another. I don’t want to sound too esoteric, but there’s definitely something remarkable happening and more and more men are beginning to address the situation. And fortunately enough, I’m with a man who shares my values and thoughts, and obviously part of his battle will be dealing this issue as well.”

Adding more women to the mix seems not only rational, but essential. Sophie emphasizes the importance of women’s roles as leaders, whether in politics, education, or any other sector of society, noting that women bring certain qualities to the table that benefit the whole.

“You know, there’s a reason why there are more women in volunteer work,” Sophie remarks. “There’s a reason why there are more women in social work. The reason is because in times of struggle, we tend to open our arms and build a social network, to come out with our problems and to talk about them because we need to. Also, women leaders have been shown to be more compassionate colleagues. Generally speaking, that’s been demonstrated. Of course, many women are occupying amazing roles in society, but there’s still a huge gap in the financial world and the political world.”

Sophie indicates it’s really about our future. Her panoramic view takes in the larger sphere of the human family where additional women in leadership means a more balanced paradigm, one that would help us take the next step as a noble humanity. That includes peace resolution work as well.

“You know, I don’t want to fall into a cliché because there are clichés out there,” Sophie notes, “but yes, I do believe that women have certain qualities — especially when you’ve become a mother or you go through your own struggles — that have allowed us to build a larger tribe to face our problems. And once again, if I go back to volunteer work, social work, health care, or nursing, I think there are a lot more women doing these types of things because some part of our bodies, not just our minds, are meant to create peace around us and to foster democracy and justice.”

Philosophically speaking, Sophie notes that we all have masculine and feminine qualities, and our internal dynamics have often set the stage for the larger societal problems we face. “When it comes to talking about gender discrimination, I think that the first thing you have to ask yourself if you’re a woman is how do I treat the man in me? And if you’re a man, it would be how do I treat the woman in me? I think that’s the first question you need to ask yourself, and the answer probably indicates how, as a human being, you interact with your environment as well as how you perceive others and the world around you.”

Sophie also enhances awareness of gender discrimination in her role as national ambassador for Plan Canada.

Plan International’s Because I am a Girl initiative is a social movement to unleash the power of girls and women to claim a brighter future for girls in the developing world.

And just why is focusing on girls’ empowerment so important?

“Helping young girls throughout this world is really at the core of the issue,” Sophie asserts. “First of all, we need to stand up for the millions of girls around the world who face barriers to their survival, basic rights and their ability to develop simply because they are young women. And when we invest in them we are directly reducing global poverty and suffering for the whole, for all of society. It’s incredible that right now, over sixty-five million girls are being denied even a basic education.”

          Girls and women are particularly affected by poverty. This is partly because they have less power to fight it, less access to the means to overcome it, or their entire families are suffering in poverty. Being born underweight, given little or poor-quality food and having little or no education can prevent girls from developing properly. Poverty can also force girls to work or get married at young age instead of going to school.        — Plan Canada

“Plan Canada really believes in the Because I am a Girl project. We really want all young Canadian women to be aware of what’s happening because we feel that we have the power, the tools and the democracy to create movements that can help abroad and bring about social change.”

Girls advocating, giving public talks, driving transformative agendas . . . Plan Canada’s Because I am a Girl clubs and speakers bureau engage girls to do just that, empowering and supporting their efforts to stand up for girls’ rights at home and abroad. “The girls give speeches and are really creating a social movement with others their age. There are website blogs and fundraisers and there’s also been a documentary made. So they’re using different kinds of media to really get out there and reach out to each other.”

With regard to Plan International’s other initiatives, Sophie explains there are current projects such as the one in Bangladesh, which supports human rights, including the protections of women and girls. She also mentions the Early Girl Child Marriage Project in Kenya which works to protect girls from this illegal practice. “There have been some documented impacts,” Sophie indicates, “and they have seen a reduction in teenage pregnancies and marriages. Also, in Burkina Faso, there’s a program called BRIGHT — Burkinabé Response to Improve Girls Chances to Succeed. So once again, it’s about education. Obviously, when you get to girls, you’re also getting to young boys and their families. So we’re trying to change parental views on girls’ education as well. That’s where it starts. If a girl is not educated you’re losing her whole soul and heart and mind. Not being educated means a girl isn’t able to fully participate in society, and the nation will be paying the price for that on every level.”

Plan Canada has also championed the presentation of a motion which was passed by the Canadian Parliament, proposing the creation of a UN Resolution proclaiming September 22^nd as the International Day of the Girl.

“I think that because of the privileges we have here in Canada, we need to be leading the way on this matter,” Sophie states. Spearheading the initiative, Canada has now established the groundwork for a global movement. In fact, the call for the International Day of the Girl is imminent and can also be supported by signing the Girl Petition.

As Sophie reflects on her own advocacy work dealing with women and children’s issues, she remarks pointedly that no matter who she meets or what type of position they may hold, there’s are certain type of person that inspires and impresses her. “Women following their own passion. Their message and their energy are completely contagious.”

As eTalk’s Quebec correspondent, Sophie is also in a unique position to not only inform but to do her own brand of inspiring. “This job is an amazing tool and a window for me to connect with youth because so many of them watch the show. Besides doing interviews, I also talk a lot about the responsibility of public personas and stars to use their voices for something important because young people look up to them so much. And there are some people in the entertainment industry who are doing amazing things. I would say that celebrities like Angelina and Brad are putting it out there that it’s important to do things to make this world a better place. I also know many other celebrities who have started fundraisers and foundations and who are doing great work.”

Sophie also mentions finding inspiration through many adventurous avenues. She plays flute and guitar, composes songs, and loves to sing (perhaps we’ll hear her sing at an event one day).

“I also get inspired a lot from my yoga practice,” she reveals. “I think that it brings me to that little person inside of me that’s the same as in everyone else. As yoga philosophy mentions, that person is in a continuous state of gratitude and peace . . . a person that’s both male and female — the perfect balance between the two. Then there’s the feeling yoga gives me of being connected to everyone — from the people in my class to every human being on this planet. It’s a feeling that really pushes me on a deep, deep level. Also, in yoga practice, there’s always this little voice that comes across in its own language and vibration that makes me feel that everything is going to be okay. That good does prevail.”

Idealistic and passionate, Sophie inspires in a way that is both personal and touching. Even as she reflects on the advice she would give her own children, one can’t help but think that, on a universal level, the message is meant for all of us.

“If I were to say one thing to my little ones, I think I would tell them that the only word to live by is love . . . self love and love for humanity.”

As a reporter, an advocate, a wife and a mother, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau is a woman whose struggles have awakened her heart to the world, allowing compassion and tenderness to direct her course . . . a woman who understands that the light of courage is far more powerful than any darkness.

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Photo Credits:  Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau headshot – Courtesy of CTV, Bell Media. Photo of Margaret Trudeau and Sophie in Ethiopia – Peter Bregg, 2006. Photo of Mutsumi Takahashi of CTV News, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau and Elena Kratsios – Courtesy of Girls for the Cure. Because I am a Girl Ambassador photo – Courtesy of Plan Canada.

Article written by Angelina Perri Birney, author of the blog, Powerful Women Changing the World, dedicated to women’s influence on world affairs. Angelina is also coauthor of the novel, PURE VISION: The Magdalene Revelation, available in print and as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple.

Follow @perribirney 


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ALMAS JIWANI of UN WOMEN CANADA: The Audacity of Empowerment

      When you give women power, you are assuring the progress of humanity.                         — Former Governor General of Canada Michaëlle Jean   

Almas Jiwani

Jumpstarting the progression of women’s rights throughout the world is no easy task. Gender equality is a cool and clinical term for a fundamental and essential right –- the right for women and girls worldwide to live free of discrimination, violence and poverty. Championing the challenge, UN Women has been in the forefront working throughout the world to secure women’s equality and empowerment.

The National Committee for UN Women Canada is an independent, non-governmental entity that supports the mission of UN Women. The organization is definitely making landmark strides in supporting the United Nations in its efforts, not only in Canada, but throughout the world. Almas Jiwani, President of UN Women Canada, exemplifies inspiration in action. A renowned humanitarian and enterprising entrepreneur, she is dedicated to the advancement of women’s rights at home and throughout the world.

As Almas relates, her resourcefulness and desire to serve a greater good developed early in her life. “I immigrated to Canada with my family in my early teens from Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We were leaving a region where political, humanitarian, and democratic institutions were collapsing. Arriving in Canada, we began rebuilding our lives, learning to navigate Canadian culture and practices and to integrate our own culture and faith.”

Almas also mentions that as newcomers and minorities, her family faced challenges but also experienced great opportunities. “At that time of my life, I realized that many communities in the developing world were apathetic towards women and did not allow them an environment for their social and intellectual growth. I also realized the importance of making a difference in the lives of the underprivileged, alleviating poverty, and uplifting women in society. This realization inspired me to begin volunteering with initiatives to promote women and advocate for their empowerment. I then became very involved with the Aga Khan Council for Canada with their various projects and portfolios. As a young teenager, facing the challenges of integrating into a new community, I made a commitment to do all in my capacity to ensure that women live as equals.”

Eventually, when Almas was making a presentation to community members in Vancouver, the president of a corporate company approached her and asked, Did you know that you have a hidden selling talent? “I felt offended, believe it or not, and he was actually trying to compliment me,” she remarks. “Then he called me a trooper—I didn’t know the meaning of the word trooper at the time—and introduced me to someone who was involved in a multimedia business. I remember being told, ‘You know what Almas, you will knock on ten doors—cold calls are extremely difficult—but eventually a door will open.’ I always remembered that message and use it in my speeches with regard to empowering women. Even if you’ve knocked on ten doors, don’t give up because the eleventh door may open for you.”

Still in all, Almas’ initial media endeavor didn’t last too long. “Being young, and having no clue . . . My dad passed away when I was eleven years old . . . I was like a one woman show. I had no idea who to talk to or who to confide in. I was doing everything on my own. It was a huge risk.” But being a risk-taker is Almas’ forte. She then ventured into international trading for a while until turning down her current road — President and CEO of Frontier Canada Inc., a corporate communications company.

Accomplished in both business and in the humanitarian field, Almas has also offered her volunteer efforts at the international level for the past nine years. “As I mentioned, I was involved with the Aga Khan Council and one of our mandates was to settle Afghan Ismaili refugees who were arriving in Canada and help the people integrate into the community and society. I was the national settlement vice chair. During the course of this, I had to attend a couple of government meetings and I guess people began to notice me. Eventually I was elected to be a member of the Board of Directors of UNIFEM Canada, and after several years, I undertook leadership in June 2009.”

Almas Jiwani and Michaëlle Jean

The efforts of both Almas and the Board has taken UN Women Canada into new territories, expanding their efforts to promote gender equality in more sections of Canada than at any other time in the organization’s eighteen year history. Almas especially notes that in 2010, a year after becoming president, she had the honor of presenting the prestigious UNIFEM CANADA Award to Her Excellency Michaëlle Jean during her term as Governor General of Canada . . . the ideal candidate because of her extensive involvement in advancing the issue of gender equality in various capacities around the world.

And just as Almas reorganized the National Committee in Canada, the United Nations also restructured its efforts to establish women’s rights around the globe by creating a new, overarching entity:  UN Women.

“UN Women — United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women — is charged with advancing gender equality,” Almas states. “It was established by a General Assembly Resolution in 2010, and became operational on January 1, 2011. We had our first official launch on February 24^th in New York. Now, UN Women is operating under the auspices of Under-Secretary-General Michelle Bachelet (former President of Chile).”

As Almas notes, the creation of UN Women came about as part of the UN reform agenda. Its main objective is to connect resources and mandates for greater overall impact and to accelerate progress towards the goal of gender equality. This includes increasing women’s economic empowerment and leadership as well as bringing women to the center of peace and security issues. UN Women is the result of the cohesive merging of four previously distinct parts of the UN system:

• Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW)
• International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW)
• Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (OSAGI)
• United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)

“UN Women’s work today builds on the strong foundation of these four parts and represents a movement to put gender equality on par with other development priorities,” Almas explains. “It represents a stronger voice for women in the United Nations and a greater advocate for larger financial investments to support gender equality initiatives. UN Women will serve as a dynamic and strong champion for women and girls and we will provide them with a powerful voice at the global, regional, and local levels.”

As one of UN Women’s independent, non-governmental National Committees, UN WOMEN CANADA (previously UNIFEM Canada), founded in 1993, is a volunteer-driven organization. As Almas explains, UN Women Canada’s key strategies of advocacy, awareness and fundraising are implemented through the following initiatives:

• Executing advocacy and media campaigns
• An annual Award Fundraising Gala
• Collaborating with public education platforms
• Public speaking opportunities
• Building membership drives and campaigns
• Partnering with private and public sector funding
• A Youth Development Conference

“This year, we have hosted five successful launches in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Papineau, QC, and Winnipeg to raise awareness of UN Women, and more launches are planned,” Almas informs. “We are also putting together a prestigious black tie fundraising gala and a youth conference to engage and empower young Canadians in actions that will advance the gender equality mission. The bottom line is we want to raise awareness and ensure that everyone knows what UN Women is all about and what our goals are.”

One of these goals, women’s economic empowerment, is of primary importance to Almas. Without it, many women continuously face a vicious cycle. “Women bear a disproportionate burden of the world’s poverty,” Almas asserts. “Statistics indicate that women are more likely than men to be poor and at risk of hunger because of the systematic discrimination they face in education, health care, employment and control of assets. Poverty implications are widespread for women, leaving many without even basic rights such as access to clean drinking water, sanitation, medical care and decent employment. Being poor can also mean that they have little protection from violence and have no role, absolutely no role, in decision making.”

According to some estimates, women represent 70 percent of the world’s poor. They are often paid less than men for their work, with the average wage gap in 2008 being 17 percent. “Women face persistent discrimination,” Almas remarks, “not only in developing countries but also in the developed world when they apply for credit for business or self-employment. They are also often concentrated in insecure, unsafe and low-wage work.”

And just how does the present economic crisis affect women in the work arena? What special difficulties does it present?

“The current financial crisis is likely to affect women particularly severely,” Almas maintains. “In many developing countries where women work in export-led factories, or in countries where migrant women workers are the backbone of service industries, women’s jobs have taken the greatest hit. When there’s a recession, women are the first to be laid off.”

And the proof is in the statistics. In 2009, the International Labour Organization estimated that the economic downturn could lead to somewhere around 22 million more unemployed women, jeopardizing the gains made in the last few decades in women’s empowerment. In addition, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) forecasted that women’s unemployment would accelerate at a faster rate than men’s throughout 2010 as the crisis continued to affect female-dominated industries such as manufacturing and tourism.

So that leaves us with getting down to the basics: A fundamental ingredient to advancing women’s human rights and economic stability lay in obtaining monies for the endeavour, as well as initiating awareness that investing in women creates a win-win situation. “Financing for gender equality is more than just securing resources and funding for institutions such as national women’s organizations and gender equality projects,” Almas recognizes. “To accomplish sustainable and deep-rooted changes, financing for gender equality must recognize women as active economic agents that are central to a vibrant economy.”

Empowering women fuels thriving economies, spurring productivity and growth.

Almas explains that gender-responsive budgeting can make a huge difference in how governments allocate funds. “A budget is the most comprehensive statement of a government’s social and economic plans and priorities. In tracking where the money comes from and where it goes, budgets determine how public funds are raised, how they are used, and who benefits from them.”

Although women’s empowerment is the focus, Almas emphasizes that gender-responsive budgeting is not about creating separate budgets for women. “I believe a gender-responsive budget should recognize the ways which women contribute to society and the economy,” Almas adds, “including through their unpaid labor in bearing and rearing children and caring for the people in the country—that’s my perception. I also feel it’s important that people see the benefits that can be derived from supporting gender-based budgeting. Seeing the benefits will encourage further support.”

Yet, it appears the most lucrative changes will occur when those power brokers steering the world economy start practicing as well as implementing changes to purge a system beset by imbalance and corruption. Nothing short of corporate catharsis will do the trick. Those sitting on top of the economic stockpile need a dose of gender equity to help provide balance in how, where, and how much funds are allocated and if women’s rights are part of the picture.

To that end, Almas relates that when making a presentation at the World Bank, she was confronted with a question regarding the prevalence of corruption within governments worldwide. “I answered by saying, ‘Let me present a counter question: How many women are sitting on your Board making decisions?’ They were silent. ‘Zero . . . that’s the answer. You want to prevent corruption, have more women on the Board. Give them the power to influence the policies and you’ll see the difference.”

In addition to supporting gender-responsive budgeting initiatives, UN Women also works to strengthen women’s rights to land and inheritance. Almas describes the struggles women face when these rights are denied.

“In many countries around the world, women’s property rights are limited by social norms, customs and at times legislation,” Almas states, “hampering their economic status and opportunities to overcome poverty. Even in countries where women constitute the majority of small farmers and do more than 75 percent of the agricultural work, they are routinely denied the right to own the land they cultivate and which they are dependent upon to raise their families. Ownership of land and property empowers women and provides income and security. Without resources such as land, women have limited say in household decision-making, and no recourse to the assets during a crisis. This often relates to other vulnerabilities such as domestic violence, HIV and AIDS.”

In other words, in most countries in the world, property rights provide protection and security. Often denied these rights, women fall victim to rejection and destitution. “In regions of conflict, the impact of unequal land rights has particularly serious consequences for women — often the only survivors,” Almas notes. “In conflict and post-conflict situations, the number of women-headed households often increases sharply as many men have either been killed or are absent. Without their husbands, brothers or fathers — in whose name land and property titles are traditionally held — they find themselves denied access to their homes and fields by male family members, former in-laws or neighbors. Without the security of a home or income, women and their families fall into poverty traps and struggle for livelihoods, education, sanitation, health care, and other basic rights.”

International agreements already underscore the importance of women’s land and property rights. The Beijing Platform for Action affirms that women’s right to inheritance and ownership of land and property should be recognized. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has addressed it as well regarding rural women’s rights to equal treatment in land and agrarian reform processes. In addition, women’s property rights are essential to realizing the Millennium Development Goals, specifically the goals of eradicating extreme poverty and achieving gender equality.

Almas also describes how globalization has contributed to an increasing flow of migrant workers from countries with limited economic opportunities. Women migrant workers, whose numbers have been increasing, now constitute 50 percent or more of the migrant workforce in Asia and Latin America.

“By creating new economic opportunities, migration can promote economic independence and status for women workers, who are often sustaining communities at home,” Almas states. “Studies indicate that migrant women workers contribute to the development of both sending and receiving countries — remittances from their incomes account for as much as 10 percent of the GDP in some countries. In 2008, remittances were estimated by the World Bank at US $305 billion. These monetary investments — used for food, housing, education and medical services — along with newly acquired skills of returnees, can potentially contribute significantly to poverty reduction and the Millennium Development Goals.”

But migration is also a risky endeavor for women, many of whom end up at the lower end of the job market. “Female migrants often work as domestic workers and entertainers — a euphemism for sex workers — in unregulated informal sectors that do not fall under national labor laws,” Almas states. “Migrant women routinely lack access to social services and legal protection and are subjected to abuses such as harsh working and living conditions, low wages, illegal withholding of wages and premature termination of employment. The worst abuses force women into sexual slavery.”

For these reasons, UN Women focuses on promoting safe migration for women around the world. It works with governments and civil society to eliminate trafficking and establish laws that protect the human rights of women migrants as well as strengthen migrants’ organizations. Since due to economic stress, women are venturing all the more to obtain livelihoods in countries other than their own, national poverty reduction programs in their homeland, including the advancement of women’s rights and ability to procure a decent living would be actions well worth pursuing to remedy the problem.

So it appears that for lasting change to take hold concepts of women’s economic viability need to change. How are women’s equality and their economic empowerment connected to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals?

UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet visiting with the women of Panama

“The statistical data at the UN reveals that the majority of Millennium Development Goals such as literacy, alleviation of poverty, access to maternal health care, reduction of childhood mortality, environmental sustainability, and the eradication of HIV/ AIDS and Malaria are all inextricably tied to gender equality and women’s empowerment,” Almas declares. “I believe that the investment in gender equality is an essential characteristic of secure and efficient societies. Presently, women and girls make up more than half of the world’s population. Yet most women are discriminated against, mistreated and deprived of their basic human rights. For this reason, gender equality needs to be regarded as a moral imperative and an urgent priority in all regions. UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, consistently emphasizes the necessity for the empowerment of women. The notion of gender-based budgeting and investment in international development projects is no longer a concession but a compulsion.”

In addition, Almas emphasizes that in societies where women have equal access to economic assets, decent livelihoods and a voice in decision-making, the economies are stronger, maternal mortality rate drops, and child nutrition improves. “Therefore, gender equality lies at the core of this issue,” she stresses. “If we want to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, we need to mainstream gender equality in developing countries. Without accomplishing this on a global scale, we will continue to ignore the plight of almost half the world’s population.”

There also appears to be a direct link between women’s economic security and an individual country’s peace and security issues. “We can clearly notice that in countries where gender equality has been mainstreamed into economic, political, social, educational, and literary arenas, such as in the USA, UK, and Canada, the economic progress of those countries increased by significant margins. Also, case-studies that include Afghanistan, Iraq and Rwanda reveal that when women are empowered economically, the country’s economy and state structure flourish. Yet, we also can see that when war and insecurity plagues these countries, any reforms or gains toward gender equality deteriorates . . . and the abuse of women’s human rights increases immensely.”

With regard to post-conflict situations, Almas notes that in Rwanda, women now make up more than 70% of the Parliamentarians. In that climate, the status of women’s economic opportunities rose. “After the resolution of the Hutu-Tutsi tribal violence in Rwanda, the United Nations and the Rwandan Government worked together to ensure gender equality, and the proper representation of women. Thus, in this time of peace, we observe a significant presence of lucrative economic opportunities for women.”

Throughout all the losses and gains, women’s groups large and small have been coming to the fore around the world in amazing numbers. Almas takes a look at the phenomenon and its effect on the progression of women’s rights. “Years of advocacy by the global women’s movement have been instrumental in the creation of UN Women,” Almas recognizes. “Civil society, in particular women’s organizations, play a vital role in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. Strong relationships between UN Women and partners from all over the world are crucial in working towards achieving these goals. So together, we can become a much stronger voice and make a more powerful impact.”

Almas refers to the current predominance of women’s rights groups flourishing around the world as a “ripple effect.” In many places, whether in the developing world such as in South or Central Asia, Africa and Latin America, or in the developed Western countries, the issues of gender equality and the progress being made in the realm of women’s rights has really struck a chord with most women.

“As a result, we have noticed exponential growth in women’s grassroots movements on the ground in the developing world,” Almas informs, “whether it’s regarding a battle for land rights, access to health-care, alleviation of poverty or a host of other social justice issues. And in the developed world, where we have overcome the core issues such as poverty and land rights, the women’s rights movement is more focused on parity between women and men in the workforce, women’s access to education, and eradicating the issues of domestic abuse . . . So I personally think that this rippling of women’s equality movements in large numbers is a positive sign. These movements also indicate that more and more women in contemporary society have the opportunity to mobilize together and champion their rights for equality.”

Throughout the years, whether volunteering or in her present sphere as President of UN Women Canada, Almas has found inspiration through her spiritual beliefs as an Ismaili Muslim, as well as from those prominent individuals who have influenced her work.

His Highness the Aga Khan

“I’ve gained much inspiration over the years from many individuals and entities that drive me forward and make me who I am as a leader,” Almas conveys. “Since my childhood, His Highness Aga Khan IV, the Ismaili spiritual leader and humanitarian, has been a huge inspirational source for me. His humanitarian ideals for empowering the underprivileged, educating women, and using civil society as a force for positive change and international development in order to foster an ‘enabling environment’ for those less fortunate is the catalyst that humbles and motivates me to serve the unprivileged women and girls of the world.”

Almas mentions other influential figures that have affected her leadership. “Emily Murphy of the Famous Five and the out-going Governor General of Canada, the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean are exemplary women that I have consistently looked up to for inspiration. These visionaries inspire me with the legacy of women’s equality present in their public service work.”

In addition, Almas also recognizes the Government of Canada and its consistent devotion to the cause of gender equality, as well as UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet and Outreach and Business Development Advisor, Mr. Antoine De Jong as important sources of encouragement. “When I see that our hard work, our time, and our knowledge is impacting and making a difference in the world, it just encourages and inspires me to do more. I want to be that drop in the ocean that makes a big difference.”

Certainly her contributions are worthy of admiration. Almas has brought her whole self to the task, including her spiritual beliefs, her culture, and a CAN DO philosophy that’s extraordinary in measure. In short, Almas Jiwani has recognized that uncertainty is not an excuse for inaction. Her fearless drive has served to motivate others in their own work toward women’s empowerment.

That personal stance is reflected in a quote from the poem, The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost which Almas finds especially meaningful.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less travelled by.

“I’m a firm believer in taking the road less travelled,” Almas conveys. “Many career women today face a number of obstacles while trying to shatter the glass ceiling. In lieu of these challenges, some women lose hope through the realization of there being no ‘easy’ way out. However, it is only through the trials and tribulations faced on the road not taken that my own inspiration and success has been nurtured. And so, I urge all women and young girls to also embark on this journey. As a result of an innovative and non-traditional approach to life, beset with challenges, I’ve become a stronger woman.”

Of that, we have no doubt.

A number of years ago in Nairobi, at an international business conference where she was a speaker, Almas addressed the audience with words which ring just as true today, embodying the spirit of her approach to life, business and the women’s movement.

“It turned out that I was the only Indian woman speaking at the conference,” Almas relates. “There were seven speakers and I was the last one. I listened to all the other presenters before me and when my time came to talk, I told the audience, I’ve decided I will not read my speech today. I will speak to you guys from my heart. I will tell you how I got myself where I am today — about my challenges and experiences, and with no background education in the field that I’m in. With no training, no guidance, and nobody to tell me what to do. Today, I am here because of perseverance . . because of this passion . . . because I want to make a difference. If I can do it, you guys can do it.’’

The story of her life is the story of her leadership.

Perhaps we can find our own strength by taking those words of encouragement to heart. For those of us questioning whether we have the power to act, we can stop wondering. Just take the plunge, as Almas did, and give it all you’ve got.

********

All photos used by permission.

Article written by Angelina Perri Birney, author of the blog, Powerful Women Changing the World, dedicated to women’s influence on world affairs. Angelina is also coauthor of the novel, PURE VISION: The Magdalene Revelation, available in print and as an eBook on Amazon, Amazon (Canada) Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple.

Follow @perribirney

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Just Vision’s RONIT AVNI — BUDRUS and The Power of Nonviolence

          Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.                                                                 —  Mohandas Gandhi

Ronit Avni

Human Rights . . . filmmaking . . . a vision of justice. Ronit Avni has fused these elements as founder and Executive Director of Just Vision, a non-profit organization that uses documentary film and educational tools to tell an otherwise untold story, disenfranchising outdated stereotypes and supporting and inspiring nonviolent peace initiatives. In short, Just Vision focuses on increasing the power and legitimacy of Palestinians and Israelis working for nonviolent solutions to the conflict.

The award-winning director and producer of Encounter Point and producer of Budrus speaks about her background and her own evolution as a human rights advocate.

The daughter of a Canadian mother and Israeli father, Ronit grew up in Montreal among an expatriate Israeli community. “Many of my friends were Israeli or had Israeli parents. Eventually, my father moved back to Israel when I was a teenager, so I would go back and forth.” Ronit eventually studied Theatre Directing in Montreal and Political Science in the United States. “I went to Vassar and then got a job at a human rights organization. Basically, I wanted to fuse my passion for the arts with my political interests. I felt that documentary filmmaking and human rights advocacy would combine my interest areas, so I began looking for ways to bring together those two fields and came across a human rights group called WITNESS that was founded by the musician Peter Gabriel. At the time, it was a project of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now known as Human Rights First). The vision behind it was to equip human rights defenders around the world with video cameras, train them to document violations and work with them to deter abuses — to capture evidence for courts and tribunals and to mobilize their constituencies.”

Ronit had already laid the foundation for continuing her advocacy with WITNESS by previously interning and volunteering with two prominent Israeli human rights organizations: B’Tselem—The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. She also mentions having bought her own camera at the time and training herself to use it. “I was eager to bring my creative and political interests together professionally. After I got a job at WITNESS, I began working with human rights advocates all over the world — primarily with groups in West Africa, the United States, and in the Middle East. So I was working in everyone else’s backyard. After September 11^th, which took place a few blocks from our office, and after the collapse of the OSLO process, I felt that I needed to focus exclusively on my own backyard which was that bridge between North America, including the North American Jewish community, and the Israeli/Palestinian context. And so I embarked on a two year research process while I was still at WITNESS.”

As Ronit relates, that process involved interviewing four hundred and seventy-five Israelis and Palestinians engaged in nonviolent conflict resolution work based in Israel, the West Bank and Jerusalem. “For me it was consultative to understand what was going on — what people were thinking, what they needed, and what they were doing,” Ronit enumerates. “It was very informative and people were very generous with their time. This was during a period when many people and organizations didn’t have websites yet, so the feeling was one of invisibility, where the people that I met with felt that they tended to only know others in their own field. If you were a human rights advocate, you knew other human rights advocates. If you were an educator, you might know other educators engaging in this kind of work. But you didn’t know people beyond your field. And so there was this heightened sense of isolation and a sense that the world didn’t know about their work. They really wanted media attention and a way to connect to broader communities of support. So after that two year process, I felt that there was a gap to be filled. Although I loved my job at Witness and was very reluctant to leave, I felt that I could apply the skills I’d acquired there to this work which I was very passionate about. I then received a two-year fellowship from Joshua Venture that enabled me to take the risk to leave my job and to start to lay the groundwork for Just Vision.”

That foundational work, as Ronit describes, developed organically as those media experts resonating with the initiative entered the picture. “One person that came on board right away was an American journalist who had been working with Linda Gradstein from NPR, named Nahanni Rous. Because of her journalism work she had extensive contacts and began researching and interviewing. I also moved to Jerusalem and set up a small office there in 2003. Then, through a filmmaker friend, I got in touch with the first Palestinian female pilot, Joline Makhlouf, who had been helping her on a film she’d been working on . . . So very quickly our team grew. Soon thereafter, I saw Control Room, and really loved the handling of the multiple narratives featured in the film. I reached out to the director and asked her to recommend one of the four editors listed. She recommended Julia Bacha (Director of Budrus) who ended up coming on as our Media Director.”

So Just Vision initially began as a core team of women –- Israeli, Palestinian, American and Brazilian. “Two of them have moved on to having children and building their families,” Ronit mentions, “but they are still consulting for us and working with us. I joke that we’re like the Mafia –- once you’re involved you can’t leave. We’ve developed really close relationships. There were years that were incredibly intense during the height of the Second Intifada. I felt we were like a little engine, and we were. We had no money. We had an idea and no track record at the time. But the idea was always to create media and to document the stories that you weren’t hearing on the nightly news.”

               Just Vision emerged in response to the lack of media coverage of Palestinian and Israeli civilians working to end the occupation and the conflict. While violent extremism receives front-page exposure, courageous nonviolence leaders and peacebuilders are relegated to occasional human interest stories. Consequently, at Just Vision, we work to ensure that these Palestinian and Israeli civic leaders are not only taken seriously as partners in the quest for peace, but are also more visible, valued and influential in their efforts.

Of course, most nonviolent initiatives by their very nature don’t make it to prime time, where sensation and drama drive ratings. Yet, the fact remains that it’s essential to depict the other side of the story, where peaceful attempts at resolution, even if initially thwarted, give rise to possibilities for lasting change. The bottom line:  Extremists get plenty of press. Stories need to be told that spotlight the peacemakers.

Ronit recognized the imbalance long ago, as well as the need to broaden the scope of the narrative. “You know, the thing that I really want to be clear about is that we’re not doing this to make people feel good about themselves. A lot of people just want to hear good stories so they can just relax and not do anything. That’s not why we do the work we do. We do it because the people who are working toward ending the occupation and the conflict are doing something really important. They need to be supported, and they need to be understood. We’re not saying that every initiative or every individual is equally effective or compelling, but we need to start from a place of knowledge and understanding. We need to try to remove the barriers toward engaging in nonviolence and conflict resolution work. I feel strongly and I’ve felt this from the beginning—and, in fact, the effects in Tunisia and in Egypt have only reinforced this for me—that any political agreement reached at the top will not hold without support from the bottom.”

Ayed Morrar of Budrus

And at the end of the day, as Ronit concludes, civil society is what leads. Eventually politicians come around, and they of course, have the power to make specific agreements, but the community-at-large is critical. “We’ve seen that with the feminist movement, the civil rights movement and so many other social movements historically, as well as those today around the world. So neglecting civil society is a major strategic mistake and also one that is going to have negative consequences in the future. That’s why Just Vision focuses exclusively on civil society and on grass roots . . . Those people who say ‘Enough is enough. I have to personally get involved in some way and do something.’ And sometimes it’s at great risk to themselves and to their families. Those are the people we don’t want to leave isolated. That’s why we try to tell their stories. We try to drive attention to them through print and broadcast media and also through social media. We create tools for educators, community leaders and faith leaders to use with their constituencies. We bring thought leaders to meet some of the people that we profile and also get them to see the stories that they may not be aware of. There’s a feedback loop. President Obama in his Cairo speech several years ago implored Palestinians to adopt nonviolence, and he cited examples from all over the world. He devoted an entire paragraph to it, but he didn’t cite a local example. He didn’t cite one because he didn’t know of one—not because a local example didn’t exist.”

Just Vision actually underscores those examples and brings them to light. “Because doing that has implications. It’s how policy gets formulated,” Ronit explains. “You know, we’re not an advocacy organization. We don’t prescribe policy, but the policymakers should not be in the dark about civil society initiatives that are moving in the direction of resolving the conflict or challenging the occupation.”

Have Just Vision’s films, Encounter Point and in particular, Budrus, made tangible impacts in promoting the idea that nonviolence is a powerful and viable avenue toward achieving a sustainable peace?

“Yes, absolutely,” Ronit confirms. “It’s happening on multiple levels. First of all, when we decided to make Budrus, we set out to put the village and the story on the map. We did a search on Google of all of the references to Budrus prior to the film production. Because the events of Budrus happened in 2003-2004 and we only started making the film in 2007, it’s very easy to look at the before and the after. Before, there were only a handful of activist websites that told the story of Budrus. But none of the major media outlets from Al Jazeera to the Israeli Press, from the NY Times to the BBC, knew the story. Some local press had gone to a few of the demonstrations but they never went back to find out what happened. But now if you were to do a search on Budrus, you would literally find thousands of references, including those from all of the top journalists and top media outlets . . . My favorite is seeing the story of Budrus mentioned without any reference to the film — where it’s now just part of the popular discourse.”

When the residents of Budrus learn that the Israeli army plans to build the Separation Barrier through their town, cutting them off from neighboring Palestinian villages and uprooting their precious olive groves, they decide to organize. Under the leadership of Ayed Morrar, Palestinian men of all political factions come together to wage an unarmed struggle to preserve their lands. Victory seems unlikely until Ayed’s 15-year-old daughter steps in to organize a female contingent that brings the women of Budrus to the front lines in a tense stand-off with the military.

Ronit also conveys another example of a village facing similar circumstances as those in Budrus — vying the placement of the Separation Barrier. “They showed the film in al-Wallajeh, and several days later when they had another demonstration, we were told that about four times as many people showed up. We also found out that after a screening in the actual village of Budrus, a march was held down to the places where they were slated to lose land, and the people planted trees to commemorate what had been done. When we showed the film to a woman’s group near the Bethlehem area that had never seen women play such a pivotal role, they were so moved that they asked to meet with the women of Budrus.” The documentary was also screened in a more unusual venue: a preparatory program that included about thirty young people who were about to enter the Israeli military. “One of them was going to be in the exact same unit that [squadron leader] Yasmine Levy was with in Budrus,” Ronit informs. “It raised some very important questions for her about what it was going to mean ethically, and what she might be faced with.”

Screenings of Budrus continue to spark both awareness and dialogue. “We don’t tell people what to do, but we want people to think,” Ronit states. “We want them to think about what constitutes a nonviolent movement and what an ethical response to a nonviolent movement would be. We also want them to think about the role of ordinary people. These are all questions that come up in the film.”

And what about the role of women? As conveyed in Budrus, fifteen-year-old Iltezam Morrar, daughter of the Palestinian leader of the village, questions why women are not involved in the protest. Once they are allowed to take part in the demonstrations, a palpable change occurs which definitely affects the process.

“Well it’s interesting,” Ronit relates, “Ayed Morrar, who is the Palestinian protagonist—the father that leads this movement in Budrus—said that the men in the village behaved differently when standing next to their wives, daughters and mothers, and that the soldiers also behaved differently. It seems there’s a kind of restraint, or at least, a relative restraint that could kick in around the presence of women. It doesn’t always kick in, but it has a greater probability of doing so than when men are just facing one another. But of course, we do see instances of Yasmine Levy beating some of the women with a baton. Yet, their presence was incredibly important, and there’s a very interesting rapport and dynamic that emerges between the women of the village and Yasmine. You can see it. But women are not playing a central role in some of the other villages that are engaging in similar kinds of demonstrations today. And none of them, to date, have had the success that Budrus has had. We can’t say it’s causal, but I think there is a correlation between women’s participation and a higher probability of a successful outcome. It’s not the only factor, but it’s certainly a factor.”

Ronit also addresses the fact that both Israeli and international activists played an important role in the protests held in Budrus. “The Israelis that came into the village recognized that they were going to be treated differently by the soldiers because they were Israeli. So that was a way to help lessen some of the violence—it would make the military think twice about using force. But it’s a very complicated dynamic. I think that the relationships built among the demonstrators were very strong. When we brought the film back to the village of Budrus, all the different political factions and the Israeli activists came to the screening and so did another seven hundred people. It’s only a fifteen hundred person village. So literally half the village came to watch the movie.”

Dubai Film Festival

Budrus is a wonderful example of the power of the media to touch us in profound ways, challenge our preconceived notions and open our hearts and just maybe our minds.                 — Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan

The film, undoubtedly, created a lasting impact. Empowering communities . . . conveying the positive results of nonviolence . . . depicting women coming to the forefront. Ronit describes another compelling factor within the Israeli/Palestinian peace initiative which, when unleashed, thrives on its own momentum. “The relationships that get built defy stereotypes and defy expectations. They’re really deep relationships. It doesn’t mean now that they’ve had exposure to one another that they’re going to embrace – that every Palestinian is going to embrace every Israeli . . . But there are deep relations of trust that are being built among these constituencies. I think those bode extremely well for the future. For example, we had a screening in Gaza, and the young people there had never seen Israelis like the activists in the film. They were fascinated.”

Prolific and often seen as much more impactful, violent images sweep across movie screens and consume the front pages of newspapers and magazine covers. Since the media is such a powerful tool, it’s important to offer alternative depictions which are just as real, and certainly just as important, in order to balance our view of the conflict and the players, as well as the possibilities for resolution.

“I think that’s a big issue in the conflict in general,” Ronit states. “I think both Israelis and Palestinians need to be able to make distinctions because if you see each side as just a homogeneous group, then it’s so much easier to demonize. It’s so much easier to say ‘All Palestinians are terrorists, or all Israelis are soldiers and settlers who only understand violence,’ or whatever the caricature language is. That’s why it’s important to understand that there’s complexity within these societies, that there are different kinds of people. Not every Israeli is Baruch Goldstein. It’s really important to not only make distinctions but actually put your actions where your values are to make sure that the other side sees the difference.”

Recognizing the potent realities of Just Vision’s work, one can’t help but wonder how covering and documenting the ongoing conflict in Israel has affected Ronit personally, perhaps shifting some ideas she may have previously held.

“It’s hard to separate out the filmmaking from the day to day work,” Ronit admits, “because Just Vision’s work is not just about making films. We interview people in the field, and we conduct outreach on a continuing basis. So my interaction with Israeli and Palestinian culture and society is ongoing. I think that certainly I’ve grown over the years in terms of my involvement with Just Vision. I don’t have any romantic illusions about anyone. It’s messy. Movements are messy. Governments and populations are messy. There are no righteous or noble victims just by the virtue of being a victim. These are things that I knew but they’ve certainly been reinforced. Yet, I am constantly inspired by ordinary people who have everything to lose. They put their families, their lives, their reputations, their liberty on the line in order to change circumstances on the ground. So I’ve simultaneously seen some very ugly expressions of human behavior as well as some of the most courageous, empathic and generous expressions of it.”

Ronit also recognizes she has gained a deeper understanding about nonviolence and what it means. “I had not been exposed to the nonviolence movement that existed historically in Palestinian society before the Second Intifada. For example, I didn’t know about the incredible protests and marches or the strikes and sit-ins that took place during the First Intifada or that have been taking place since the ’20s and ’30s in Palestinian society. None of that history was something that I was aware of. I had seen the First Intifada through the lens of the Western media and through the Israeli press. I also didn’t grasp the extent to which ordinary Palestinians were sitting in Israeli prisons. I think my default assumption had been ‘Well, there must be a reason.’ Also, over the years, after seeing the arbitrary nature of how people get detained, how violence gets used and how decisions get made, that instinctive benefit of the doubt that I afforded one community and not the other while I was growing up is gone.”

Since films like Budrus have opened the aperture further, highlighting nonviolent leaders in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and recognizing the power of peaceful demonstrations, there’s been a promising breakthrough. Although there are still exceptions, Ronit notices a difference in how other journalists and documentarians are treating the problem.

“There’s been an improvement in terms of recognizing that these movements exist, and that they’re important,” Ronit asserts. “So I do think that there’s been a change. There’s no question. I mean the fact that people are referencing these movements is the biggest change, frankly.”

Ronit also underscores how Budrus has helped in thwarting old narratives. “I think the narrative amongst the Israeli public has been Why don’t Palestinians adopt nonviolence? If they did, there would be peace. In Palestinian society the narrative has been Nonviolence doesn’t work. We’ve tried it. The American society narrative is Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? . . . This film challenges all of those assumptions. You’re seeing journalists pick up on those themes and write about them differently or reference and incorporate them into their arguments.”

And so another salient and controversial issue rears its head. Responsible journalism. Is it important for journalists and filmmakers to not only present “facts” but to use the force of media to benefit and not exacerbate the problem?

“I think that journalists have a responsibility to report on events and phenomena that are taking place in a particular region,” Ronit states, “and to try to do so dispassionately in general and get a complete picture of what’s going on to the best of their ability. But very often in this context, people default to the closest native speaker of whatever language the journalist speaks as opposed to the native language of the region, whether it’s Arabic or Hebrew. So that limits the pool of people that are featured. Also, it’s very hard to encapsulate these movements in a photograph or a headline. If you show a building that’s been bombed or a bus that’s exploded, it’s easy to make sense of that immediately. Whereas, if you see a picture of a group of people standing around, it takes a lot more work to really cover the story. And often, I think many journalists make the mistake of waiting for it to be a mass movement like what we saw in Tahrir Square (Cairo). They wait for it to get to that critical mass point before giving it coverage.”

Ronit also recognizes that smaller, less dramatic peace initiatives are staples in building a movement. “In fact, the building blocks are as important as the outcome. Those building blocks are critical – and often they’re small and disjointed in some way. Reporting on these stories requires a lot of patience, a lot of effort, and a desire to really understand the local dynamics. And I also think, along with budgets being slashed in terms of long-term reporting and the default, especially, to local English speakers, that there is a general bias against nonviolence. There’s a feeling that it’s not as newsworthy as violent actions.”

As Ronit indicates, there are a number of obstacles to having stories on peace activism see the light of day. She notes it can be frustrating when a local stabbing involving one militant actor warrants media attention while five hundred people at a nonviolent demonstration doesn’t receive coverage. “There’s a question of proportionality and scale that I think is often missing,” Ronit indicates. “So at Just Vision, we try to complement existing coverage. We don’t say that we have all of the stories. We’re not outfitted as a twenty-four hour news cycle type of organization. We’re there for the long haul. We work exclusively on this issue because we want that depth of knowledge and that scope of contact on the ground so we can really understand what’s happening.”

And that understanding provides a powerful framework for Just Vision’s goal and philosophy: To direct attention to Israeli and Palestinian nonviolence and peacebuilding efforts, working with and beyond traditional media. Top down leadership is clearly not enough; an end to the conflict will be rooted in the work of Israeli and Palestinian civilians.

“I think that we want these nonviolent leaders at the table,” Ronit elucidates. “By ‘at the table’ I mean being covered by journalists, paid attention to, taken seriously, taken into consideration on the diplomatic level and supported on the grassroots level. Those who are favoring a nonviolent approach — one which recognizes that the two peoples are here to stay — are the best hope we have for a stable future.”

The film, Budrus, highlights and gives voice to that recognition, inspiring hope in the most basic aspects of human understanding. Originally released in 2009, it makes its DVD debut on May 10, 2011. And the Budrus Outreach Campaign is on the move as well. “It’s been very positive. We have different staff members who engage in outreach in the United States, in Palestinian society, and in Israeli society,” Ronit states. “Fundamentally, no matter the specific audience, there are three core messages: unity across divides, the power of nonviolence, and the strategic importance of women’s involvement.”

By exposing us to nonviolent leaders and initiatives, Just Vision provides a more encompassing view of Israeli/Palestinian relations, one where human decency and fair treatment is given a chance for survival. Within these small grassroots movements, we can recognize the power of peaceful resistance, where individuals, armed only with passion and principle, can make a difference.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.    —  Mohandas Gandhi

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All photos used by permission. Photo of Ayed Morrar by Aisha Mershani.

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MARIANNE SCHNALL: Daring to Be . . . Feminist.com

            Feminist.com cares not only about supporting women’s accomplishments in the outside world, but about a woman’s inner growth and healing, underscored by the belief that fostering women’s personal empowerment is the first step towards being able to express our true power and individual special gifts in the world.

Marianne Schnall

Cultivating awareness and educating and inspiring women and men globally, Feminist.com is a dynamic online community that acts as a portal, funneling generative ideas while providing information and resources that address issues such as violence against women, gender equality, environmental sustainability, and peace.

And just who is the feminist behind this dot com? Marianne Schnall, founder and Executive Director, is also a writer and interviewer who has dedicated herself to building the organization’s ever-broadening horizons. Interviewing influential and powerful women and harnessing their inspirational messages has been her forte.  

As it turns out, 2010 was an exceptional year for both Feminist.com and Marianne. In December, Feminist.com celebrated its fifteenth anniversary, and along with that milestone, Marianne Schnall launched her new book, Daring to Be Ourselves: Influential Women Share Insights on Courage, Happiness, and Finding Your Own Voice.        

Born in New York, Marianne says she realized early on she was going to be a writer, right from the time she won a city-wide contest in sixth grade for one of her short stories. “I always really enjoyed writing,” Marianne states. “I became an English major at Cornell, and then when I graduated, I worked for a literary agent. After that I applied for a job as an editorial assistant to the managing editor of US Magazine. One of the editors there started sending me out to cover industry events like movie premiers and award shows. So I would go and get on the red carpet with my little recorder and ask my questions. It was really fun and glamorous, and I had a great time doing it. I didn’t think it necessarily connected with what I really wanted to do with my life, but I got a lot of experiences through it. Certainly, that’s how I started with interviewing.”

Marianne also credits the March for Women’s Lives in 1992 for influencing her career path. “I decided to ask US if they would send me to cover it as a reporter. That was the first time that I interviewed people like Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, Jonathan Demme, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Cyndi Lauper. All of a sudden I found myself speaking to celebrities about a cause they felt passionate about.”

The March, as it turned out, was an awakening for Marianne on several fronts: the first with regard to her feminist consciousness—a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body; secondly, as an activist, she was able to experience the power of being in a community of people who cared about similar issues; the third awakening, as Marianne notes, was about the use of fame itself—celebrities using their renown to promote a good cause. “It was the first time that I felt that I was doing something that was really connected to my path . . . something that was meaningful, and I felt like I was talking to the real person behind the celebrity.”

Shortly after the event, Marianne left US and began doing free lance work. “When InStyle Magazine started up, I started doing their Cause Celeb column. That allowed me to interview all sorts of amazing people about their causes.” Marianne recalls talking with Bette Midler about the New York  Restoration Project. “They were cleaning up a park and she was there in her overalls with her daughter and her husband.”

Investigating this whole other aspect of celebrity became Marianne’s passion. While she was interviewing famous people about their causes and charities, her husband, Tom Kay, whose background is in solar energy, was surfing another wave. “Tom always had a very pioneering way of thinking,” Marianne remarks. “He decided to launch this site on the internet called Ecomall.com back before people knew what the internet was. I mean literally, when we first launched, people couldn’t find the site because they were spelling out the word dot. That’s how new it was.”

Venturing forth onto the web, Ecomall launched in 1994. Feminist.com took off soon after in 1995. “People didn’t even understand what we were doing. They didn’t have home computers, no one had e-mail, and no one knew what the internet was.” As Marianne explains, after having just interviewed Gloria Steinem and other feminists she found herself at a picnic one day speaking with a women’s studies major—a conversation which led her to acquiring the domain name Feminist.com. “I got the name before I knew what Feminist.com was going to be and before I would have ever said ‘I’m a feminist’. That wasn’t part of my identity.”

Marianne immediately called several friends and colleagues to help define what this budding organization would represent. Those friends, still on the board and advisory board today, include Amy Richards, Lauren Wechsler Horn, Karen Obel Cape, Susan Celia Swan, and Jennifer Meyerhardt. Together, along with her husband, Tom, they pioneered what literally has since become a “feminist Google.”  

“Back then, about 15% of internet users were women,” Marianne states, “so there were very few women on-line. Also, most organizations didn’t have websites. So the very first thing we did was to provide a service to have a free web presence for groups like the Ms. Foundation, Equality Now, Girls Inc., and V-Day.”

As it also turned out, Marianne relates, V-Day was actually founded at a Feminist.com board meeting. She recounts how she made the initial connection with Eve Ensler through the suggestion of a mutual friend of theirs, actress and activist, Kathy Najimy.

“Kathy just said, Her name is Eve Ensler. She’s a writer, she’s a feminist, she’s an activist. Call her. Don’t ask questions.” Marianne did just that and has shared a rich history with V-Day ever since. “Eve was just starting to do the Vagina Monologues downtown and knew she wanted to do it as a fundraiser to help stop violence against women. She came to a Feminist.com board meeting in my dining room. That’s where the term V-Day was coined and where the seeds for that first fundraiser happened . . . So I can really attest to what Eve has accomplished.”

The story is another example of how Feminist.com has grown, allowing structure to form naturally along the way. “The whole site has really developed organically,” Marianne maintains, “without a set mission or plan, which turned out to be a good thing because we could really change with the internet, with the number of women coming on-line, and also with where feminism was headed. We could be a little bit more fluid.”

Just as the definition of feminism has been broadening, Marianne indicates that Feminist.com is continuously evolving. She mentions how freeing it was not to approach the site holding a limited view. “There are a lot of definitions of feminism that I would definitely not sign on to. So I think that what has been wonderful about how Feminist.com has developed is that we’ve been able to see how we can use the site to correct misconceptions and how to present a version of feminism that is more inclusive—that doesn’t shy away from the little controversial elements and actually holds them up for dialogue and reflection.”

In addition, Feminist.com also looks for the voids and niches it can fill. “We’re launching a section called Young Voices in conjunction with Carol Gilligan,” Marianne offers. “She’s an amazing psychologist who wrote this pioneering book called In a Different Voice which is all about how gender roles start so early. Boys lose their authentic voice around four or five and girls lose it around nine or ten. The idea is that there’s all these societal pressures that, before you know it, make people lose their true voice. You see it so much in little girls. I have two daughters so I’m hyper aware of this type of thing, even though they’re so much more empowered and independent and centered than I was at their age.”

And giving those voices a platform is essential. Feminist.com’s new section Girls & Young Women appears to be not only offering messages of empowerment to the younger generation but also a space for their ideas to flourish. “There are two reasons why we reach out to younger women at our site,” Marianne says. “One has to do with just what we were talking about—a lot of these issues happen really early on. So we’re constantly looking for both content and resources that we can offer by, for, and about girls and young women. But also, there’s this misconception that the younger generation is just completely complacent and that there’s this kind of resentment thing going on between older and younger generations of women.”

Marianne mentions that, although there may be some truth to the statement, she believes the notion is mainly fostered by the media. “I think that it may look different . . . feminism . . . in the younger generation than it did for let’s say people of Gloria Steinem’s era . . . but I take issue with people who say that younger women these days are completely apathetic. That’s not my experience,” she contends. “It’s hard to speak for a whole generation, and granted, there are going to be exceptions to every rule. But there are so many amazing blogs and groups and things happening on college campuses these days, so I really don’t think that’s true. At Feminist.com we are constantly trying to find young women’s voices and groups that are doing amazing work, and we’re helping to promote them.”

Furthering a holistic view of feminism that encompasses being environmentally conscious is also an initiative.

               In addition to supporting humanitarian causes, feminism should also include taking care of and nurturing the Earth, the planet we all live on and depend upon for our sustenance and survival.     — Reflections [Feminist.com]

“I see it all as being interconnected,” Marianne asserts. “The definition of feminism that I hope that Feminist.com presents is this idea that it’s larger than just a gender thing—that it really is about our interconnection with each other and with the earth. What we do to the earth affects us. It’s a symbiotic relationship . . . So, for me, feminism is really about respect for all life and all of its various manifestations.”

As Marianne confirms, what we’re really talking about is raising our awareness and consciousness to a level that serves men, women and humanity as a whole. “It’s about love and respect,” Marianne asserts. “It’s just like the same way that having an eating disorder is self destructive—it doesn’t honor ourselves or our bodies—if we mistreat the earth . . . if we pollute the earth and put toxins into it . . . then that’s also connected to how we treat our bodies and the beautiful planet and animals that we live with.”

Marianne’s interviews have also placed her in contact with extraordinary women who are truly inspirational, linking feminism to global initiatives affecting the planet. “I’ve had the great privilege of interviewing two amazing environmentalists,” Marianne remarks “One is Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel peace prize for the Green Belt Movement. She planted forty-five million trees across Kenya. . . And then of course, there’s Jane Goodall. That was actually one of my favorite interviews. Who better to talk to about some of these themes in such a deep and thoughtful way.”

When exploring the subject, we can’t help but discover an important fact — Pillaging the earth is symptomatic of a larger problem which needs addressing: a disregard for the feminine and the abuse of women. Through columns such as those provided by Amnesty International, V-Day, RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), Equality Now, Men Can Stop Rape, and Nobel Women’s Initiative, as well as questions explored in the Ask Amy – Violence Against Women section, Feminist.com is offering resources to assist those who are victims of abuse as well to help on a preventative and educational level.

“Regarding violence against women, we have worked really closely with V-Day because of our long-time relationship with them.” Marianne also notes their collaboration has produced the Anti-Violence Resource Guide, which provides both international and U.S.-based resources. “I have to say, because I’ve interviewed Eve Ensler so many times and constantly post her work and V-Day’s work, I think there’s nobody better than Eve to make sure we’re remembering what’s happening in places like the Congo. Actually, out of all of the interviews that I’ve done, some of the ones that have been the most wrenching have been with her . . . And she doesn’t talk about it as just a women’s thing. It is that, but it’s also about if we’re treating women and girls this way, then that’s a symptom of an overall problem with humanity and with a culture that breeds people who rape and produce violence—with a culture that produces wars, like what’s happening in the Congo.”

Marianne also stresses the importance of not condemning men or making sweeping statements like, “Oh, all men are bad. It’s more about let’s have a thoughtful conversation.” That means including men in the dialogue and making sure they are an active part of the solution.

“We’ve had a column for many years called Men’s Voices, Men as Allies. It started out being done specifically by a wonderful organization called Men Can Stop Rape and then it evolved into including a diversity of male voices. It’s one of our most popular columns. Pat McGann and I—Pat works at Men Can Stop Rape—decided that it would be very useful and timely to devote a section to the whole idea.” 

As Marianne explains, this upcoming section—Men and Women as Allies—would provide a space for dialogue. Not only would it continue highlighting men and women joining forces on issues such as rape, physical violence, and gender equity, but it would provide a venue for “redefining masculinity and helping men see how constrictive gender roles impact them in negative ways.” It would give men a safe base where they could read about the issues as well as dialogue with each other, and just as important, dialogue with women. “It’s actually one of the projects I’m most excited about,” Marianne mentions, “because I think that, with the groups and people that we have in place to be partners, we can do something in a really thoughtful, sensitive, and dynamic way.”

And isn’t that the aim? Working toward creating non-violent societies, no matter where in the world, means embracing humanitarian values. For men to ally with women, for them to break free of stagnant and harmful societal roles, for men to view gender equality as a human rights issue as well as a women’s rights objective, and for men to be a vital part of prevention makes ending violence toward women and creating a more peaceful world finally seem attainable.

               Our mission is to empower people to re-imagine and transform the roles of women and men and encourage them to break barriers so they can be agents of social change in the world. 

Concurrent with the partnerships men and women are creating to address the problem, women’s groups are coming to the fore everywhere around the world, and like many of the powerful movements in history there seems to be a spiritual dynamic involved. Marianne addresses the phenomenon—what’s been called spiritual activism—as it relates to feminist causes.

“Well, I think that people are calling that the fourth wave of feminism,” Marianne states. “Actually, I try to get away from linguistics although sometimes they come out of my mouth, but I do think that there’s this spirituality-infused social justice movement that is connected to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This idea that it really does start with our inner world and that we have to be the change we want to see. That’s what the Our Inner Lives section which we just launched tries to do—honor all the paths, whether you define that as spirituality or as a traditional, organized religion.”

               We are committed to creating a space that represents as many women as possible—women who embody a diversity of religious, faith and spiritual identities as well as those women with an unnamed hunger, longing, or confusion. Together, we translate our compassion into tangible paths to positive change in the world, recognizing our interdependence with each other and the earth.

As Marianne indicates, there’s an interconnection between our internal and external reality. Our Inner Lives emphasizes the commonalities between many of the world’s religions and its various spiritual traditions in the sense that most of them, at heart, try to promote compassion and love. 

“And it’s not just about going out and joining the Peace Corps,” Marianne enumerates. “It’s also about how you treat your neighbors or someone in your family who is being difficult and going through a hard time. Just finding ways, both little and big, to have more consciousness and mindfulness in how we’re going through the world.” Marianne regards the fact that it starts with some inner reflection—that we’re often unaware of what we can or should do. “One of the quotes I include in my book is from Natalie Portman who mentions that volunteering is more for her than it is for the people she helps. It’s very soul nourishing and meaningful and joyful—that sense of doing good.”

Feminism’s big picture encompasses so many diverse elements. What about the issue of including spirituality in the conversation? Can we go as far as to say it’s an essential part of the equation?

“I think it’s hugely important, but I think it’s delicate,” Marianne concludes. “It has to be very sensitively handled because I think, in the same way that feminism is one of those loaded terms, spirituality can be so misinterpreted.” Marianne mentions that at Feminist.com they’ve taken special care to have an advisory team that includes women from Omega Institute as well as others who represent different faiths and perspectives. She also makes a point of connecting regard for the spiritual with the need for men, as well as women, to respect and value their own feminine wisdom. “I always thought that Feminist.com represented the feminine energy in the world as being something metaphysically bigger than just the gender association of feminism. And that’s one of the wonderful things I think Omega does in their conferences, which are all about women and power—bringing forth this idea of feminine power and new paradigms of power—honoring values that are typically associated with the feminine, which doesn’t mean necessarily with women.”

Marianne makes the connection between spirituality and the need to honor feminine energy in our attempts to resolve many of the world’s difficulties. “It’s making sure that we are in touch with the feminine values that we all have—the masculine and the feminine, the yin and yang in the world.” Marianne notes the timeliness of the concept, making reference to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s important book, Half the Sky, and its global initiative. “Right now it’s becoming more mainstream to acknowledge the truth which is that helping, empowering, and educating women and girls throughout the world is completely interconnected with all of these other issues that we’re facing—whether it’s war or violence or whether it’s about poverty or the environment.”

It is definitely a vast, humanitarian effort in many ways. And in order to make any significant strides, we need to emphasize women’s leadership, especially with regard to peace initiatives. Feminist.com is highlighting the issue through its evolving Women & Peace section, which has plans to expand and will examine women’s roles in building peace.

And the reason for emphasizing female leadership is simple. As Marianne observes, women need to be an integral part of conflict resolution. “As over half the world’s population—as the mothers, the daughter, the sisters, the wives, the educators, and the leaders—we have to be involved in every aspect of the peace process in order to accomplish lasting peace. And also, just look at how domestic and political violence are connected. You can’t have peace in the larger world without looking at what’s happening behind closed doors. It’s the connection between the private and the public—how women are treated in a society. . . If you look at Afghanistan or at Kenya, girls aren’t educated . . . it’s seeing how these things are connected to why war and violence are happening.”

Throughout her assessment, Marianne stays clear of stereotyping. When speaking about “the feminine” in any arena, including peacekeeping, she stresses that she’s referring to qualities like compassion, cooperation, intuition, and expressing emotion, “and that it’s okay to cry if our son goes off to war and dies. Not that men don’t do that, but men have often been taught to suppress their emotions. Carol Gilligan talks about the first time a boy cries when he’s about four or five and he’s called a sissy and from then on thinks that showing emotion is wrong and unmanly.”

Derogatory remarks and unrealistic gender expectations have been a big part of the problem. Thus the struggle. As mentioned in Daring to be Ourselves, we don’t need to be wrestling with words, especially with the term “feminine.” We certainly don’t need to be feeling pigeonholed if we use it. Both women and men have feminine traits, and as Marianne notes, these qualities need to be celebrated as part of all of us. Could authentic living may be part of the answer? Sounds a bit simplistic, but allowing the feminine and the masculine to be expressed in our lives, whether we’re male or female, may finally help create the kind of balance our world desperately needs.

Marianne regards Omega Institute’s Women & Power conferences as being pivotal events that address this quest for balance. She acknowledges them as inspirational forums that help women believe in their ability to be leaders and voices of change. “I think that Omega is at the forefront of really promoting some of these themes that we’re talking about,” Marianne remarks. “I have such respect for that organization. Elizabeth Lesser [cofounder of Omega], who is also in my book, is a true visionary, an incredible person and author.” Marianne also makes reference to the Women’s Institute, now officially known as the Women’s Leadership Center. “Carla Goldstein, who runs it, is a very good friend of mine. They are doing really exciting work and are a very close partner of Feminist.com.” 

At Omega’s 2010 Conference, Our Time to Lead, Marianne and Feminist.com cofounder, Amy Richards, taught a workshop together, Activism in Your Own Voice. “One of the things that was great about doing the workshop with Amy is we had everybody go around and say what their definition of activism was and what brought them to the conference and to our workshop . . . the women were so excited and happy to share their stories. Yes, there are these amazing people who speak at the conferences, but there are also some really amazing people in the audience.”

As Marianne concludes, women inspiring and motivating each other to keep the momentum of self-awareness and change going is important. Overcoming the fear of acknowledging their own voices—of becoming authentic—is a key step in harnessing genuine power.        

At the first reading and book signing for Marianne’s book, Daring to Be Ourselves, which was held at the Kleinert/James Art Center in Woodstock, NY, she cited a quote by activist and author, Loung Ung.

Courage is when you dare to be yourself.

Marianne found that theme popping up with most of the women she interviewed. She now reflects on what the quote means to her personally as well as within the context of feminism. “I think that for the book, it just emerged as the overlying theme,” Marianne remarks. “As I looked at all of the various quotes and messages, it was just very clear that it was that simple—just being who we are. It almost sounds ridiculous because it sounds like the easiest, most obvious thing we should all be doing and yet very few of us often are, or we’ve gone through periods of our life where we’re not.”

Perhaps, as Marianne suggests, that’s because there are so many forces affecting all of us—women and girls, as well as men and boys—which constantly inform us that we’re not acceptable as we are, ceaselessly urging us to change and make ourselves into something else.

Girls, in particular, are under constant pressure from the media about their body image. Marianne reflects how that stress affected her as a teenager. “I blew dry my hair straight every day, dyed it blonde, and dieted my way until I was borderline anorexic,” she divulges. “We’re all told we have to look like a super model or just why bother. But also internally, like Carol Gilligan says, we’re told from early on not to value our genuine voice. Sometimes I think what happens—and this happens to a lot of women and happened to me for quite some time—is that we have no clue who we are, and that’s a really lost feeling to have. I think we’re so on autopilot that women can go through their whole lives having no idea who they are and therefore aren’t in touch with what would give them fulfillment and happiness. What a waste and what an atrocity. So to me, it’s really that simple and that powerful—just finding your true voice and honoring your authentic self in all the various ways that you can.”

And if you bring your whole self to the task, whether that’s furthering a feminist cause or any other human rights issue, it makes the endeavor all the more powerful.

Marianne agrees with the premise. “Yes, that’s what naturally happens . . . like when we were talking about the connection between spirituality and feminism or spirituality and activism. Once you do this kind of inner work and start honoring yourself, it becomes this contagious thing. You can’t look at other people without seeing your common humanity and recognizing yourself. I remember—I think it was with my older daughter when she was in fourth grade—there was another girl who was saying unkind things again and again. I  found myself saying something so simple which really resonated, something like ‘You know, for this girl to act like that she must be a really unhappy person. I feel so bad for her because if you were a happy person, it doesn’t make you feel good to act that way.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you try, rather than fighting back or getting into a thing with her, just responding with love. You know, compliment her or just smile.’ As Marianne relays, her daughter told her the advice helped. “Now sometimes when things like that happen, I’ll just say, ‘Just respond with love,’ which is easier said than done. But sometimes it’s just about that . . . having compassion.”

Of the many fascinating women Marianne has interviewed, when asked to choose one who was particularly inspiring, she mentions Jane Fonda.  Just before their interview, Marianne read Jane’s autobiography, My Life So Far, which is about her personal journey—about her eating disorders, her marriages, being an actress and the pressures and insecurities that came along with her career. “But it was also about how it took her until she was in her sixties, post her divorce from Ted Turner, to really find her power and find her voice—to find out who she was. That was a big theme through my interview with her,” Marianne recognizes. “It just had a profound effect  on me because it really helped clarify the fact that the same thing had happened to me. . . It took me until my thirties to really start to wake up out of this society-imposed slumber that I had been in. So it not only was a personal revelation that way, but it also made me want to focus on making sure that we instill these messages in young women and girls so they don’t have to wait that long to reclaim their voices or, perhaps, not lose them at all.” 

Although it’s difficult for her to pick one quote from Daring to Be Ourselves that resonates with her own personal journey, after a moment of reflection, Marianne acquiesces. “It actually closes the whole book—the Alice Walker quote. It ties in with the overlying message, which has to do with finding your own voice and also finding your inner leader in order to produce change in the world.”

               We do carry an inner light, an inner compass, and the reason we don’t know we carry it is because we’ve been distracted. We think that the light is actually being carried by a leader or somebody that we have elected or somebody that we very much admire and that that’s the only light. So we forget that we have our own light—it may be small, it may be flickering, but it’s actually there. So what we need to do, I think, is to be still enough to let that light shine and illuminate our inner landscape and our dreams—especially our dreams. And then our dreams will lead us to the right way.       —  Alice Walker

Expanding on those words of wisdom, Marianne offers further insights to those of us who feel a bit dwarfed by the overwhelming needs we see expressed in the world today—whether they be women’s agendas, humanitarian issues, or global initiatives addressing peace and security. What exactly should we remember as we venture forward?”

“To have love and compassion for yourself,” she says plainly. “To take the pressure off that you can do it perfectly. . . It’s starting where you are and not thinking that you’re going to go out and found another V-Day. It’s literally just looking at your own family, your own neighborhood, and into your own community as you go through the day for ways to be mindful. It’s about how you’re interacting and the energy you’re putting out into the world. And . . . it sounds corny . . . just spreading love the best we can.”

Spreading love may just be a dare in itself. But if it’s a heartfelt desire, we’ll muster the strength to be up for the challenge. With enthusiasm and courageous effort, Marianne exemplifies that one woman is capable of doing just that—believing in a vision and becoming herself.

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Visit Marianne’s website to find out more about Daring to Be Ourselves and for scheduled appearances.

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JAMIA WILSON of the WOMEN’S MEDIA CENTER: Feminism’s Authentic Voice

               Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.      — Coretta Scott King 

Jamia Wilson

The media has a powerful influence over how society views women as well as how women perceive themselves. The Women’s Media Center, founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, is an organization determined to address and redress that image. Increasing  women’s prominence and visibility in media as a core objective, WMC recognizes the need to change the conversation so that media more accurately represents the perspectives, positions and priorities of women.

The question looms: Just how are they going to go about doing that? Sexism is certainly not a new phenomenon. Jamia Wilson, Vice President of Programs, asserts it’s a multigenerational fight. And it appears she’s up for it, her life experiences having prepared her with the audacity and vision to further the movement’s lineage.

“I have always been passionate about women’s issues,” Jamia states. “That’s probably because I was raised in a really strong family of women. In feminism, a lot of people talk about their click moment, when they first realized they’re a feminist, but I feel that I’ve always known. I just didn’t know its name was feminism. I also knew early on that I wanted to do some kind of social justice work. That’s something my parents were involved in doing during their personal time—working in local campaigns and initiatives.”

Jamia recalls how her mother and father would encourage reflection and how they would go the extra mile to broaden her scope of understanding. “I would get deprogrammed after school,” Jamia states, laughing. “My mom would ask, ‘What did you talk about in class today?’ When I told her she might say, ‘Okay, well maybe there are some books that you should read that would cover the other side of that issue.”

Born in South Carolina, at the age of five and a half, Jamia moved to Saudi Arabia with her mother to join her father who had already been working for the past year in a Saudi University. “I remember not really wanting to go, having seen some of the movies about that part of the world. Even at that age, there were images in my mind that encouraged a fear of this Middle Eastern other. My parents quickly changed that perspective for me and I went.”

Jamia notes that her life in the Middle East still impacts her perspective today. “Growing up in a school with over thirty nationalities represented has really had its effect on me. It’s influenced my relationships. It’s affected how I look at the world, and how I look at war and peace. It’s even influenced how I look at feminism. I’ve heard a lot of people make comments about women in the Middle East and their plight. I really find it problematic when I see judgment or any kind of negativity that promotes this idea that there’s no agency among Middle Eastern women because there is. It’s just different. There are many really strong Saudi women who are doing amazing things.”

Eleven years of Saudi Arabian culture under her belt, Jamia once again took up residency in the U.S., continuing her education and graduating from American University in Washington, DC in 2002. It was soon afterward that she began working for Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund, eventually managing their outreach program VOX: Voices for Planned Parenthood. Having also helped to organize the participation of thousands of students in the historic March for Women’s Lives, Jamia has definitely traveled her own path in the women’s movement, reaming knowledge along the way. “When I was in DC managing VOX, I was working with all the different affiliates on the youth initiatives in the national office. It was then that I realized this was the work I loved and what I really wanted to do.”

After venturing to New York and obtaining her M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU, Jamia discovered there was a position open at the Women’s Media Center. “I wanted to work at WMC because I knew that I needed to be involved again in a major way. Now I’m getting to collaborate with people I worked with before like Shelby Knox, who is a young feminist activist, and Gloria Feldt, who’s a mentor and was also my former boss at Planned Parenthood. Gloria is a social media expert and just really amazing—someone who’s shown me I can do anything that I want and also be super powerful and dynamic.”

Dynamic intention seems to be the glue holding this multigenerational women’s initiative together. The Women’s Media Center links tried and true strategies with fresh, progressive initiatives to rattle the status quo, all the while presenting a new media paradigm—a blueprint positioning women at every structural stronghold from cornerstone to apex.

               The WMC works to amplify women’s voices on key issues in the national dialogue, fight sexism and bias against women in the media, and increase professional opportunities for women across all forms of media.

In order to achieve that aim, Jamia explains, the Center strives to make certain that women have equal representation. “We can’t tell the whole story if we don’t have everyone’s voices represented. We do that through our media advocacy campaigns, our media accountability campaigns, and also through our leadership and media training for women.”

The WMC’s flagship program for media training, Progressive Women’s Voices, gives women opportunities to go into studios and practice different techniques to expand their media platforms. “They’re taught everything from how to use social media to on-camera training that involves practicing hostile and friendly interviews,” Jamia states. “They learn how to be thought leaders.”

               PWV trains and mentors emerging political commentators to ensure there are plenty of qualified, authoritative, progressive women experts available to the media.

“Not Under the Bus,” Jamia relays, “is our reproductive justice advocacy campaign, promoting women’s freedom to choose. In addition, we also have our media accountability campaigns like Name It Change It which we’re doing in partnership with Women’s Campaign Forum and Political Parity. That program is about confronting sexism against female candidates in the media. We challenge media outlets when we see them giving a platform to that type of targeting. We ask that they take our Equality Pledge to discontinue those sorts of attacks and to make certain that they’re focusing on the views of our candidates and not on the way they look or dress—that they’re not promoting misogynistic stereotypes.”

               We must erase the pervasiveness of sexism against all women candidates — irrespective of political party or level of office — across all media platforms in order to position women to achieve equality in public office.

Girls are also prime targets of media hype. Jamia conveys how the Women’s Media Center is dedicated to pushing back against the onslaught. “We recently had our SPARK Summit which is now the Spark Movement Campaign aimed at standing up against the sexualization of girls in the media.” As Jamia explains, the movement sprouted from a 2007 APA Study which found that sexualized images of girls was linked to, among other things, increased eating disorders and lower self esteem. “It’s important to make sure that girls are not only protected from this kind of media but are proactive about it,” Jamia maintains. “Debra Tolman, a professor at Hunter and a big proponent of the study, partnered with Lynn Michael Brown, a professor at Colby College, to bring together a new feminist coalition to fight against this sexualization. That’s where the WMC came in. Along with other partner organizations, we wanted to bring girls together to have a day long conversation about the movement we were going to ‘spark’, with girls not only leading the conversation but also leading the initiative.”

The SPARK Summit, held in New York this past October, gave girl activists ranging from the ages of fourteen to twenty-two the tools they need to take a stand against the prolific ” target=”_self”>sexualized images presented by the media, as well as the opportunity to create meaningful messages and make media of their own.

“The training we gave the girls was an abridged version of what we do for Progressive Women’s Voices, just specially tailored,” Jamia relays. “We gave them on-camera time, and the girls were also able to show their videos and get feedback from each other. We also gave them a platform to blog during the event and to do social media tweeting—live tweeting—as well as to create video blog interviews. Some of the girls had already created their own documentaries which we included in the Summit. What was important to us was to convey that this is truly a girls-led movement. They have their own ideas about what to do about fighting back.”

Jamia also speaks about how WMC live streamed the event so that those people who were unable to come to New York for the convening could virtually participate. “We had people from Alabama to Dubai who were virtually streaming in,” Jamia recounts. “It was amazing. They were able to chat and interact and have their own community with each other. I was in a couple of panels where we took questions from that virtual audience. It was really exciting for me—interacting with people who weren’t present but who were really engaged in the conversation.”

During the SPARK Summit, the girls also had the opportunity to interact with women they admire. “Geena Davis was our keynote speaker,” Jamia mentions. “She’s brilliant. She has her own center on media [The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media]. She is such an excellent role model because she’s done a great deal of work of her own and has used her privilege to help uplift others in a really powerful way. The girls also got to meet Gloria Steinem. They just loved her and were so excited to be able to engage and learn from Gloria and she from them. So for me, it was great to see this intergenerational movement building, which was one of our goals for the summit.”

Weaving the generations together to create a more cohesive force seems like a sound plan. Within the scope of the women’s movment, young feminists valuing the accomplishments of predecessors is an essential element in assuring the success of the endeavor. “I have seen the importance of intergenerational movement building from the very beginnings of my life and also know its importance by being involved in this work. There are those who have come before me who have given me advice, have mentored me and given me the power to continue. I know that a lot of my peers have a similar view, so I think that young feminists really do recognize what has been achieved before us and what work we need to do to in order to continue things forward. We see our role.”

Still, there are women who don’t consider themselves feminists, who may not fully appreciate the type of effort it took to establish rights that they wouldn’t second guess today. Jamia indicates that “education is the key” in creating awareness of the work that’s gone into past attainments and maintaining a well-rounded perspective. “You really should be learning about equality at a young age,” Jamia states. “It’s a larger conversation about history and how we talk about it and how we treat it. We need to teach people about their predecessors. We need to write more women into history and really create a narrative tradition of passing on these stories.”

Of course, most of us will never know what it’s like not to be able to vote or get our own credit card without having our partner’s permission. Jamia recognizes that although she’ll never go through those experiences, she can appreciate their significance. “I’m grateful that I’m living in a world where people have laid that foundation for me, and I hope to be able to do that for the people that I precede. I believe when we understand what has been laid out before us, we have appreciation and want to work to move it forward.”

Working toward women’s voices being an integral part of the media is key to upholding a more balanced and just society. That essential truth is what must urge us forward today to establish women in all levels and sectors of media, as commentators as well as on the organizational front. There is certainly a danger if we don’t.

One aspect of that danger, as Jamia indicates, is “not having the whole story. Women will not be able to make their mark on history which will lead to a larger problem—people in future generations not understanding how they got where they are. Our history is so powerful. Coretta Scott King said, ‘Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won—you earn it and win it in every generation.’ I believe that as well. We can’t just let go and take things for granted. We really need to know about our history. If we don’t have women out there who are getting reported about, or there isn’t an archive being created about our lives, then we’ll never be able to make that mark. That’s why it’s so important for our voices to be heard. Women need to see each other in the media and hear each other’s voices in order to remain empowered. We need to see other women doing the things we all aspire to do.”

In that respect, Jamia herself is an example. Passionate about her beliefs, she brings her own spiritual path to her work, including the idea that “our success as a movement depends on our ability to respect spirituality’s role in the feminist conversation,” a provocative stance she presented in her blog article, Manifesting a Movement—a Spiritual Uprising.

But there are some women who feel their position is weakened if they bring spiritual beliefs into the picture. “There are people who feel that expressing that part of yourself means you are somewhat naïve—that you’re not thinking intelligently,” Jamia states. “I’ve even had conversations with feminists who’ve asked, ‘How can you be so interested in God when you know that this concept of God, in an organized sense especially, has been used to oppress us?”

Jamia’s answer is one that reveals spiritual reflection rather than dogmatic rhetoric.

“I see a very strong synergy between spirituality and science,” Jamia concludes. “When I was at Planned Parenthood I had some very hard conversations with coworkers about where I stood on some of the issues. They didn’t understand how I reconciled being a Christian with my belief in science. Basically, I believe people have free will, and I also believe that the concept of God is so much more expansive and powerful than our human understanding. It’s perplexing to me why people are so bothered about bringing spirituality into the conversation because to me it just seems so inherently real—that there’s this life force. It’s not necessarily about believing in a deity but really understanding that there is something beyond us that’s part of the situation.”

That ‘something beyond us’ which Jamia refers to has almost always infused our political struggles—for better or for worse. With this in mind, the women’s movement may find itself further strengthened by being more open and willing to include spiritual values and beliefs in the dialogue—creating even more power within an already shifting paradigm.

“We need to take our moral conversation back,” Jamia asserts. “I think the right has done a really great job using the moral frame and putting out this idea that they have a premium on values—that they have a stronghold on any kind of worthwhile conversation. I completely disagree with that. I believe that the reason I do this work is very spiritually driven. It’s something I wouldn’t have chosen if I didn’t have a belief system that made me think about what ‘right’ means or what ‘justice’ means.”

Jamia mentions feeling hearted to be in a community of feminists who are spiritually involved. Presently, she’s on the Advisory Council for Our Inner Lives, a project of Feminist.com founded by Marianne Schnall. Our Inner Lives honors women’s spiritual beliefs and practices, recognizing how they enrich all our human endeavors. Jamia is also a board member for REVEAL, an organization dedicated to empowering and advancing the next generation of feminine spirituality—secular feminists and fiery women of faith who come together and understand that faith and feminism create a soul-fueled form of activism.                        

“I think that there are some very strong women who are demanding that this conversation about spirituality and feminism be brought to the forefront,” Jamia proclaims, “and I’m really happy about that. I remember being interviewed for an article on pro-choice and spirituality. Some people wrote comments below the article like ‘I’m writing her off  because you can’t be pro-choice and a Christian. She says she does yoga and is interested in Eastern philosophy. How can you relate to those things and still have Christian beliefs?’ It was really interesting for me to see that kind of closed-mindedness coming from some people. They’re actually promoting energies that are oppressive and that shut people down. Instead, we need to be more open to the spirituality conversation—open to different ways of attaining our goals in the movement.”

While attending  this year’s Women & Power Conference presented by Omega Institute in New York, Jamia mentions she was able to see many women address the spiritual aspects of feminism—women of international repute like Leymah Gbowee, who organized several thousand Christian and Muslim women in Liberia to help bring peace to the country after a fourteen-year civil war, and Ani DeFrano, singer-songwriter and feminist who Jamia interviewed. “When I asked Annie about spirituality,” Jamia reveals, “she basically said she believed that most of the great activists that she knew were deeply spiritual people.”

Jamia also stresses the role feminist leaders like Jodi Evans, cofounder of CODEPINK and part of WMC’s board, have played in her life. “I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Jodi and being able to meet someone who’s organization mobilized a lot of the different actions I was a part of in college and that had energized me to get involved in peace work when we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. So for me, it’s been a great blessing to be able to meet some of the people who really catapulted that work.”

Building upon that thought, Jamia notes the importance of women’s voices being included in peace initiatives, as well as the kinds of messages those voices convey. “Women have a deep investment in the peace conversation because we are usually at the helm of our families and are so greatly affected by conflict. We often bear the brunt of many burdens—in finance, in health care, as well as on our bodies when rape is used as a weapon of war. So I think that makes us really important messengers of peace and compassion. I also believe it’s important we’re carrying that message because we have such a deep involvement with children. We’re planting seeds in their minds about how we define friends and how we define enemies.”

Jamia also touches on WMC’s connection to this larger picture—using media to focus on the conversation of women’s human rights. “We’re working on an upcoming project on public education about genocide and its effects on women, specifically the story of women in the holocaust and their suffering due to sexual assault. We’re taking a look at the connection between that atrocity and more current ones such as in the Congo and Rwanda—how things might be different today if we had really talked about what those women went through back then. So I’m happy we’re going to be raising awareness about what’s occurred, because when you look at mob mentality and mass movements against entire races of people, they’ve usually stemmed from the fact that nobody spoke up. It’s like the Martin Luther King quote: In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

The Women’s Media Center is determined to break that silence. But changing the course of women’s roles in the media is no easy task. Jamia’s vision for the WMC encompasses holding an even broader conversation, and that dialogue, driven powerfully forward by the organization’s intergenerational collective, is harnessing the strengths of the past to the promise and initiative of the present.

“There have been some people who’ve said, ‘We need to be in the streets. We don’t need to be blogging as much or on social media.’ But I believe we need both,” Jamia contends. “When Marianne Williamson was at the UN MDG Summit, she was asked how she felt about all the blogging young feminists were doing. She responded by saying that blogging was a beautiful way to bear witness, and I agree. I also think that we can use these tools—blogging, video, etc—to organize marches and spread messages, to spread a feminist gospel, so to speak. It means we can still be somewhere and show solidarity, and we can also live stream a summit.”

The world, ready or not, is facing a new wave of feminists. Image-makers and information outlets hold on to your hats as women man the frontlines. Armed with computers, laptops, iPods, flip phones, video cams and every social network platform known to humans, they are determined to flood media pipelines with women’s voices and their agendas.

Yet throughout it all, as Jamia Wilson emphasizes, the foundation for true success lies in acknowledging something deeper.

“When a woman suffers, I suffer.”

And it’s that voice of suffering that must move us—not to rail against the tide but to focus our collective energies toward turning it. As the Women’s Media Center states, diversifying the media landscape is critical to the health of our culture and democracy.

Women’s voices, empowered with conviction, will be the key to that deliverance.

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MARIE C. WILSON and THE WHITE HOUSE PROJECT: Add Women Change Everything

Marie Wilson

There’s a powerful storm forging across the nation, one which aims to turn the tide, advancing women’s leadership in all spheres right up to the U.S. presidency. The epicenter:  The White House Project.

By filling the leadership pipeline with a richly diverse, critical mass of women, we make American institutions, businesses and government truly representative. Through multi-platform programs, The White House Project creates a culture where America’s most valuable untapped resource—women—can succeed in all realms.        –- TWHP

Marie Wilson, founder and president, stewards the organization’s initiatives. Born and raised in Georgia, she was the first woman to be elected to Iowa’s Des Moines City Council as a member-at-large in 1983. Marie also served as president of the Ms. Foundation for two decades before leaving in 2004 to focus her energies on The White House Project.

Sitting in a small conference room with Marie at TWHP’s Manhattan headquarters, one senses her dedication and passion for women’s issues. Gracious and down-to earth, she reflects on her background and what brought her to the Ms. Foundation and eventually to The White House Project.

“It’s interesting. Most of the things I’ve done have developed through just observing what’s going on around me, like many women do, and trying to figure out how to get up in the morning and perhaps do one thing that will make a change,” Marie muses as she recalls the journey. “While I was working in Iowa in the early ’80s, the farm crisis was killing the state. Yet at the same time, I could see that there were a number of women creating these little service businesses. I got really interested in what they were doing and decided I wanted to help other women, who were also struggling, to do the same. But none of the men I was working with would give me free reign to pursue that.”

It was on a dare, Marie divulges, that she applied to the Ms. Foundation. Eventually, she left her city council position and joined Ms. with the aim of doing microenterprise work. “When I got to the foundation, I found the two other women in the country who knew anything about the subject,” Marie remarks. “We basically became the mothers of microenterprise. That was actually the beginning of the first project in this country that started to build the microenterprise movement for women.”

At the helm of the Ms. Foundation for twenty years, Marie recalls how wonderful it was to fund women who she referred to at the time as ‘the government-in-exile.’ “They were creating programs and services around the economy and healthcare. They developed living wage campaigns. They created new ways to deal with choice. Finally, I recognized we ought to just get them into the county commissions, the city councils, the legislatures and congress because then we could stop advocating our lives away.”

That seed thought eventually bore fruit. “The Ms. Foundation had been doing Take our Daughters to Work for years by then,” Marie recounts, “and all these little girls had written me about how they were going to be leaders and that they were going to be the president. So when you get thousands of letters, you start to listen up. In addition, there were grantees who had done great work and then had it pushed back by city council or state legislature after they’d gotten a policy in place. Then we had to start over and give them money again. It was just so crazy. I realized I needed to do something about it, so I hired someone to do research on women’s leadership. I was shocked at how few women were in leadership positions anywhere.”

In 1998, that realization led to the formation of The White House Project, which as Marie explains, “allowed us to focus on going through the door of the presidency. We thought, ‘Well, this will get their attention.’ No one can say we’ve already had a woman president.”

And that fresh, bold initiative is exactly what we needed. Supporting women’s leadership roles, whether in government, politics, business, education or religion is especially important in the development of a truly representative society. “We aren’t using all of our democratic resources,” Marie notes. “Abigail Adams wrote ‘Remember the ladies’ and John Adams basically answered ‘Not on your life.’ But we have to remember them. We know that diversity is the key to attaining new solutions. We’ve actually lost so much ground by excluding women of all races from the leadership of our country, communities and companies.”

          If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.                  — Abigail Adams

The key word, Marie concludes, is transformation. Speaking matter-of-factly, she points toward the “enormous bifurcation of parties and a democracy of people who aren’t always educated about the issues—people who don’t know what they’re advocating. That’s why we need to get the kind of women that The White House Project is training into power—those who are dedicated and really versed in the issues and who are helping families and communities survive. It’s important these women make it into all sectors because that’s how it will work.”

The White House Project’s groundbreaking report, Benchmarking Women’s Leadership, provides solutions with regard to achieving a critical mass of women leaders across a number of sectors: academia, business, film, journalism, law, military, nonprofit, religion, politics, and sports. Marie explains the report’s objectives.

“The White House Project’s Corporate Council started looking at people’s comfort level regarding women’s leadership. We reviewed ten sectors as well as the presidency and vice presidency and realized that if we wanted to change things, we had to show people the numbers. So we did the research. It turns out that even though people’s comfort level is rising regarding women in power positions, women’s leadership is not. It’s about an 18% average across every sector. We reflected on what men could do to help change this. First of all, they have to hold their companies accountable. Quotas around board positions are in effect in other countries like Norway, the Netherlands, France, England, Canada, etc. So now we do have some publicly trading companies requiring that forty percent of their board of directors be women. Our own country is horrible about quotas, but quotas work.”

In addition, Corporate Council members, being corporate women who are active agents of change within their corporations have conducted interviews in their own companies, directly asking senior officers why there weren’t more women in leadership positions in their firms. “In these confidential interviews,” Marie reveals, “male executives were willing to admit that women were not only generally more perceptive but were more apt to be working for the good of the company rather than for their self-aggrandizement. They felt there should be more women in power, but it just wasn’t happening yet.”

But it needs to happen, and soon. The time for women to share power with men in decision-making at all levels within the financial, educational, human rights, and environmental sectors as well as in any aspect of social reform has more than just come, it’s been here for a while. We’re especially confronted with this imperative in the realm of peace negotiations. Women need to be much more involved in peace initiatives if we are to attain any kind of lasting resolution.

“When you read about the origin of wars, you’ll see they don’t usually break out over national issues,” Marie stresses. “They’re incited by what goes on inside countries—lack of access to food and water, human rights abuses—these are conditions that cause war. Women actually are more in touch with these types of struggles. They’re usually the ones getting the water and bringing it back to their homes, for example. They’re physically involved with the difficulties, so they understand that issues of human security start disputes. Also, because they’re not usually involved in the fighting, they’re more apt to be able to reach across the table and negotiate. Women have had to learn how to work and connect to people they don’t agree with. They have not had the power or the ability to say, Well, just get lost.”

So what exactly do women have to offer that would be helpful in resolving conflict situations? Marie makes the distinction that beyond any innate qualities, women have had to develop practical skills.

“Women have had to nurture, but I think whether you go into nature or nurture, women have not been at the head of the table. They haven’t exerted the kind of command or control to say War or No War,” Marie remarks pointedly. “Actually, I’m more interested in the skills women have than the experiences that they’ve had as nurturers. Women have had to sit around tables and figure out how to bring groups together. They’ve had to negotiate with each other and with men to have any power at all.”

This idea of women needing to work with each other more and find strength and power in numbers is an important one to consider. In Marie Wilson’s book, Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World, she explains why we need more women at the top alongside men, not just for the sake of fairness, but for the larger social good.

When I look at the issues we face, and when I think of the changes we need, I am as convinced as I have ever been that our future depends on the leadership of women—not to replace men, but to transform our options alongside them.             Closing the Leadership Gap

“The aim of the book was to do just what it did,” Marie states. “It was the first book in a long time about the importance of getting a critical mass of women into power. At the time I wrote it, I hoped it would not only jumpstart the work we were doing at the Project—training women around the country for political leadership—but to get organizations and individuals to see the structural issues that are underneath why we don’t have more women in positions of power, that we do need to look at the opportunities women have to lead. It’s also important we look at the numbers. We need a critical mass, at least a third. The idea is to make women’s leadership alongside men normal.” 

A lot of energy has gone into the effort to create that normalcy. The White House Project can certainly be credited for pioneering the vistas of women’s leadership, all the while keeping it’s eye on the goal:  A woman in the presidency.

“We were ground zero for reenergizing the women’s political and leadership movement,” Marie asserts, “In its way, The White House Project has served as an idea generator and apple seeder. We’ve certainly made strides in negating the notion that women have already attained parity with men with regard to leadership. We’re getting people to stop saying, ‘Oh, we have an organization in our state that trains twenty women a year,’ as if that was enough. Can you imagine the opposite—an organization that trains only twenty men a year to run for office?”

Not likely. Besides, men already have a well-trod path into political leadership. It’s quite a different story for women. Training is what we need, not simply an abstract review, but the kind of schooling that offers a true-grit mentoring, preparing us for not only the practical levels of leadership but versing us in the real-life issues that affect us all. That includes national and international security.

In her 2008 edition of Closing the Leadership Gap, Marie added a new and timely afterword, No More Waiting: Women in Politics and in Time of War, offering her thoughts regarding the importance of including women in the security debate.

“I wrote that afterword when the country was in this terrible situation. We weren’t talking about getting out of Iraq, and we were dealing with Afghanistan. I was also aware that we had lost the elections in terms of progressive stances on war and peace because we had not really helped the country redefine security, or for that matter, define what it would take for us to have a secure world. I felt strongly that we needed to get more women understanding they had to be a part of this conversation—that women had something worth saying.”

Partnering with Participant Media in their social action campaign, START Now Summit 2010: Women Leaders for Nuclear Security being held in Washington D.C. this October, The White House Project is now working to ensure that women are more involved in the nuclear security debate. “We want women in this training who really care about the issue of nuclear security and are willing to get out into the world and talk about it,” Marie states.

Marie reveals that her concern regarding nuclear proliferation goes way back. She recalls coming out of college during Kennedy’s presidency and fearing some future calamity. “I remember being worried about having kids and thinking that one day all this nuclear stuff would kill the children. But thank goodness we’ve been able to get this far. Recently, one of my little grandchildren was over our home and I felt the same knot in my chest I had years ago. I thought, ‘I want this lovely child who is so sweet and who thinks the world is so good to grow up safely in it.’ I’m sure I’m not the only mother, grandmother or aunt with this concern. That’s why I’m happy that we have this opportunity to present the summit with Participant Media as well as the film, Fair Game, so we can talk to women about this issue.”

          Participant Media’s Social Action campaign for Fair Game will explore the issue of nuclear security and emphasize the importance of the participation of women in politics. Through strategic local events, and a two day summit on advocacy, organization and communication, as well as education on nuclear security, the campaign will mobilize women across the country to take the lead in advocating for Senate ratification of the New START Treaty.                              — Takepart.com

Mobilizing women to advocate at all levels of leadership is fundamental in establishing overall security both nationally and internationally. When asked how she feels about women’s economic well-being as an additive in the mix, Marie makes the distinction that although economic security is a desirable goal, it still falls under a larger umbrella.

“A country where the women are more economically secure does have a better shot at overall stability,” Marie states. “Yet it’s important for women to have political power, too. Perhaps we need to do what India has done. That country is ground zero for microenterprise, but India is also ground zero—after working close to twenty years to get there—in establishing women in thirty percent of local government positions as well as in parliament. So yes—economic security, financial security, healthcare and safety—they’re all tied together, but without political power you can’t deal with any of these major issues. It’s the thread that runs through everything. That’s why I’m so devoted to The White House Project, because if you don’t have that thread moving through it all, then what’s accomplished can be sabotaged and changed in a hair’s breadth in a Supreme Court decision. We need that political power.”

And The White House Project, having recently trained 120 women in Duluth Minnesota, is helping to assure we attain it. Marie notes that “if you look at Minnesota, half of the county governments don’t have one woman on a county commission. It’s like that all around this country. People just don’t understand. Across our states, there isn’t the diversity we need at the table, and that’s killing us.” 

As a way to germinate a more versatile society at large, The White House Project also calls on us to Ignite a National Movement to Inspire Girls. In 1993, during her time at the Ms. Foundation, Marie co-created Take Our Daughters to Work Day, [now known as Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day] providing the opportunity for adults to take girls into the workplace. She reflects on the roots of the initiative.

“Take Our Daughters was a wonderful experience for me,” Marie affirms. “This simple idea of taking your girl to the office and showing her what you do every day, talking to her about why you are a traffic guard, a bus driver, a surgeon or whatever. We wanted girls to be inspired to change what’s around them in this country—give girls the opportunity to make change in their world and show them how to do it.”

Showing girls how they can aspire to become anything they wish and enter any office of leadership, including the executive office, has been a passionate directive for the organization. It’s certainly led them down interesting roads, eventually landing them at an unlikely door. Could a doll be a part of the answer . . . Barbie? 

“Well, it’s interesting. I initially approached Mattel to raise money. They wouldn’t give it to me so I said, ‘Maybe you should make that doll’s dream house a White House so she’ll have something to dream about. Make her the president.” Marie admits she was being facetious. “When Mattel said ‘That’s a great idea,’ I was so surprised.”

But as it turns out, it was another piece of the puzzle that fell into place. Believing using popular culture to be a powerful way to make change, Marie found herself remembering the advice of her mentors. Go where the people are. “Now we’re doing that through film, television and documentaries, as well as with this doll. In fact, we’ve had a wonderful relationship with Mattel. They have a great group of young women who are really dedicated to using Barbie for girl’s empowerment. She’s portrayed as having all these different careers now. Barbie has definitely been reenvisioned.”

A woman’s vision of herself appears to be one of the foundational keys to her success. In the larger scheme, using images to alter how women, as well as men, are perceived allows people to change their view of what could be possible. Once again, with popular culture as the venue, The White House Project aims to transform traditional images of women by honoring artistic works that highlight bold, courageous females that are not only leaders but have revolutionized how women are perceived in their fields. In this way, the Epic Awards celebrates women’s leadership in the media and popular culture.

“We realized that if we wanted to change the number of women in leadership, people needed to see women in different roles. You can’t be what you can’t see,” Marie declares. “Therefore, I thought it would be great to honor the television programs, documentaries, books—anything in popular culture that portrays women as leaders. Actually, it’s been hard in Hollywood to make a film about a woman leader because they don’t sell. But what appears to be happening now is we’re seeing some new films and television programs that are about women spies—tough women. There’s shows like Covert Affairs and movies like Salt. As I mentioned before, there’s also the film Jeff Skoll and Participant Media have made, Fair Game, which is about what happened to Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA agent who was outed.”

But venturing into the world of pop culture is not a new venue for Marie Wilson. “We’d gone to Hollywood for years trying to get a show done about a woman leader,” she mentions. “When ABC finally decided to do one—Commander-in-Chief—Anne Sweeney [president of Disney/ABC Television Group] called me and said ‘We’re doing it.’ So then The White House Project took that show all over the country. We had house parties and screenings as well as a big event in Washington and another here in New York. That show gave us the opportunity to see a woman in a truly powerful position—as the president of the United States. Seeing that image normalizes it for us.”

Yet, even as we perceive images of strong female characters on television and movie screens, women still need to remember that helping each other is essential in reaching our leadership goals. Marie addresses the issue as well as why we sometimes stand in each other’s way, not being as supportive as we could be.

“To a great extent there just hasn’t been enough power to go around for women,” Marie elucidates. “As long as you are vying for three slots, it’s very hard not to be competitive. I was talking to a group of corporate women who I just love. Perhaps I was a bit preachy, but I told them I would really like it if all four of them would just sit down with each other and say, ‘Okay we all need to look at our futures. So where do you want to go, and where do you want to go? How am I going to help you? How are you going to help me?’ Women need to do this because as good as we are at negotiating peace, we’re not good at negotiating power. It’s like the Grameen Bank model. One woman gets money. She gets her business going. The next woman gets some of the money and she get’s hers going. They all help each other.”

Women assisting each other and building security for their communities is sweeping and worldwide. It’s no different at the organizational level. As Marie explains, you can’t change anything unless you’re willing to work with other groups. “We partner with everybody in our states. We don’t even go into a situation until we sit down with people and ask ‘Do you want us here?’ because only if the local Y or the local Latino or domestic violence group wants you in the area, do you actually belong there. So yes, we partner. We’re partnership queens. We can’t do it alone.”

Marie recognizes that beyond these partnerships, one of the most important aspects of The White House Project is the core training they’re providing. “We’ve got the most diversity and numbers of any group in America now in terms of women we’re training. I think that’s our specialty.”

VOTE, RUN, LEAD has trained over 10,000 women—almost all of them in political leadership. “We’ve taught thousands of women how to run for office. They’re women of different races and diverse backgrounds who are not only running, they’re winning.” Also, as Marie indicates, there’s an extra added benefit. “What you need to learn in order to run for office is what you need to learn to be a leader anywhere.”

And creating leaders is Marie’s business. Undoubtedly an inspirational figure in her own right, she has helped women across the nation stand with power and recognize they need to be included in order to create a truly democratic paradigm.

Directing her sights back to the larger picture, Marie offers a final bit of sound advice. “I think it’s always good when you’re talking to anyone about the issues that affect women to remind them how important it is for men that women make progress—that they are empowered, that they are leading. What’s hard for young women is when they are put down for being one of those feminists, instead of people recognizing that to be for women is really to be for men. It’s the best thing you can do. It will change the world for all of us.”

*****

 Photos used by permission.

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Waging Peace: MEDEA BENJAMIN of CODEPINK

       Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.  — Gloria Steinem

Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK

A radical, a crazed lunatic, unpatriotic, a communist. . . perhaps even a sorceress.  

Strong women speaking truth to power have always received some form of derogatory press. By the time either the media or more conservative, political zealots are through, an outspoken intelligent woman can be portrayed as the next Medusa.  

Medea Benjamin is no exception to the rule. Brushing past the slurs, an intelligent observer quickly concludes that Medea is no ordinary woman. With a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University and another in economics from the The New School, Medea has worked as an economist and nutritionist in Latin America and Africa for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health organization, the Swedish International Development Agency and the Institute for Food and Development Policy. Medea is also co-founder of the San Francisco-based human rights organization, Global Exchange, as well as co-founder of CODEPINK Women for Peace.  

So what turned “a nice Jewish girl” from Long Island into a political activist?  

“Now that goes back some,” Medea remarks. “Actually, I think it all began for me in high school. I remember when my sister’s boyfriend was sent to Vietnam and mailed home a souvenir of an ear of a Vietcong. I was so disgusted by it that it set me on a path of trying to understand why some people considered others lesser human beings. I wondered how we could reverse that. Also, there were real inequalities in the high school that I went to which resulted in race riots. So here I was in a supposedly quiet, suburban Long Island neighborhood that was suddenly racked in the sixties by race relations and war. That kind of thing certainly leaves a mark on you, especially if it happens earlier in life as it did in my case, when you’re just trying to figure out what you want to do and become, and how you want to live your life. All of it urged me down a path of trying to get people to like each other more.”  

Helping people to like each other can sometimes be a monumental task. Intolerance, abuse, greed, political gain . . . War is often the sad result of their erosive wear. CODEPINK Women for Peace is dedicated to turning the tide -– from funding war and aggression toward looking for new avenues for our resources such as green jobs and better healthcare. They are resolved to helping support policies based on diplomacy and compassion rather than those rooted in fear and suppression. From stopping the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to preventing new aggressions from arising, CODEPINK seeks to activate, amplify and inspire a community of peacemakers through creative campaigns and a commitment to non-violence.  

Oftentimes when we hear of such monumental endeavors, we tend to envision some huge campaign behind them. Not always the case. CODEPINK, Medea explains, started when a group of women concerned about the environment got together for a retreat that was organized by a group called Bioneers. “We sat around for several days talking about ways we could address the environmental crisis. During our breaks, we also talked about 9/11 and the US response—the bombing of Afghanistan. We discussed the pending war in Iraq and the color coded alert system that Bush had just declared. It was so odd and nobody knew what to do. We were laughing about it and saying ‘okay if it gets to orange is that when we get out the plastic tarps? When do we use the tape? Do we put it around ourselves or the terrorists?’ So initially, we had some good laughs about the whole thing. But of course, we also realized how serious it was. We could see there was all this negative male energy out there — Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and also George Bush. We felt we needed to inject some rational, loving female energy into the situation. So we put the group together, initially thinking we’d call it Code Hot Pink until we found that the URL was taken by a porn group,” Medea conveys, laughing. “So we dropped the “hot”, which was very disappointing to some of us, and we went with the name CODEPINK. The idea was to turn the color pink on its head from being this nice, feminine, sweet color to one that was very energetic, bold, and determined.”    

That bold determination has created initiatives like Women Say No to War, inspiring women around the world to become active participants in peacemaking and social change. “We wanted to mobilize women in this country, but we also found in the process that women from other countries were contacting us and saying it’s time we all work together across borders. So Women Say No To War is our attempt to take on issues that we can work on with other women. Some are joint projects like supporting refugees from Iraq who are now living in countries all over the world, but particularly in Syria and Jordan. We’re also helping to promote women’s voices in Afghanistan who are speaking out against the war, as well as working on smaller scale projects run by women that we feel are helpful in building community.”  

CODEPINK has actively supported women of the Middle East when they have risen up to oppose injustice. “In Afghanistan, when the Karzai government was passing a law in order to get more votes from the Shia community, the president, Hamid Karzai, agreed to a law that basically instituted marital rape. Some of the women in Afghanistan rose up to oppose it under very difficult conditions, and we were there to support them and to echo their desire to get rid of the law. Our efforts were successful to a large extent. Then there’s Iran. We have looked toward people like the Nobel Peace prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, for guidance with regard to good campaigns to support. We have also taken groups to Iran, Afghanistan, and to Iraq—obviously places that are oftentimes dangerous and difficult for Americans. That’s because we feel it’s important for us to meet directly with women from different countries so we can learn from them and have a deeper understanding of how we can best support their efforts.”  

Women-induced peace initiatives are creating imprints in other Middle Eastern arenas. CODEPINK, as Medea explains, is one of several groups which are taking on the gritty task of demanding humanitarian relief for the Palestinians virtually imprisoned in Gaza. “CODEPINK became very involved in Israel/Palestine after the Israeli invasion of Gaza that left over 1,400 Palestinians dead. We felt particularly concerned that US tax dollars and our military hardware was used in the attack. CODEPINK has also taken many delegations to Gaza in the last two years. It’s hard to get in which is why many other groups don’t try. We had a beautiful delegation of almost 100 people, including Alice Walker, that went in on International Women’s Day in 2009.”  

Medea also stresses the need for us to remember what’s actually happening in Gaza. “There’s a population of nearly 1.5 million people who are living in what’s equivalent to an open air prison. They aren’t allowed the freedom to go in and out of the area, really only surviving thanks to the United Nations and other charitable organizations,” Medea states. “So we’ve been trying to push the Israeli government to lift the siege. Along the way, we’ve made great connections with the women inside Gaza and have been encouraging them as much as possible, both politically and practically. We support projects like women’s crafts, for instance, so they can make a living. That’s what we do — back concrete projects as well as longer-term policy goals.”  

Yet real change in policy will never manifest while human beings are being held in bondage and humanitarian aid denied as the international community stands by, allowing it to occur without repercussions. The Humanitarian Flotilla situation is no exception. What have we really seen in the Obama administration that leans toward condemning such actions, especially with regard to the Israeli government?  

“We haven’t seen much change from the Bush administration to the Obama administration in terms of policies toward Israel,” Medea asserts plainly. “They’ve been somewhat firmer on the issues of settlements but continue to really turn a blind eye to Israeli violations of human rights.”  

          The U.S. government has been complicit in arming Israel and enabling its human rights abuses, including the ongoing siege of Gaza that has kept 1.5. million people living in the world’s largest open-air prison. In July 2008, the United States signed a contract worth $1.9 billion to transfer the latest-generation of naval combat vessels to Israel at U.S. taxpayer expense. Currently, Congress is in the process of appropriating a record $3.2 billion in military aid to Israel this budget year. This aid must be stopped.   CODEPINK – May 31, 2010  

Medea gives her assessment as to why the U.S. government continues to support Israel in such a biased way. “If you look at who controls policy, it’s really the lobby group AIPAC –- American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It’s really strong and well organized. On one level, you have to be in awe of their ability to influence policy. They even draft legislation and get it passed before we’ve even heard of it. It’s quite remarkable,” Medea states. “Along with the NRA and AARP, AIPAC is one of the strongest lobbies we have in the U.S. It gives tremendous amounts of money to the Democratic and Republican parties so it has a very fierce stranglehold on policy, always showing unconditional support for Israel. We’re actually mobilizing now to try to directly expose AIPAC and how it’s policies control American interests. When AIPAC holds its annual meeting this coming March in Washington, D.C., CODEPINK will have a counter gathering there at the same time in order to discuss what we consider a more even-handed policy.”

No doubt, confronting organizations such as AIPAC by shedding light on hard-nosed and unfair tactics are becoming more and more necessary. It’s also become obvious, as well as essential, that women’s voices are heard in any serious attempt to attain peaceful resolution.  

“Oftentimes women and children are the number one victims of war, and they are usually excluded when it comes to trying to find peace,” Medea remarks. “Take the example of Afghanistan where women’s oppression is used as a justification for U.S. military intervention, and yet when it comes to trying to develop a process of reconciliation, women in Afghanistan have had to struggle hard even to have a place at the table. CODEPINK has been working with the women there to push for them to gain that seat. It’s not easy because whether it’s the Taliban or the Karzai government or whatever, no one wants to include women in peace talks. So since most of the time women are not at the table, then the process often doesn’t take into account women’s needs. Using Afghanistan again as an example, any peace process has to include a guarantee that girls will be able to go to school under a negotiated peace settlement. For women, that issue is high up on their list. Yet if they’re not at the table, who’s going to voice those kinds of demands. That’s why CODEPINK is helping to support them in having more of a say. That’s why the United Nations passed Resolution 1325 which states that women must be part of any peacemaking process.”  

Although women’s roles are emphasized, CODEPINK is not exclusively an organization of women. Medea talks about men’s response to the organization’s mission.  

“The support we get from men, depends on what part of the world we’re in. Unfortunately, there are still many areas where women are treated more like property than like human beings. There’s still so much work to do to guarantee women’s rights. Actually, we have a lot of men that work in CODEPINK that are our allies, our colleagues. They’re some of our best activists. So even though we’re a women-initiated group, we have never been exclusively made up of women. We feel that this gives us a unique kind of position. We have the women’s perspective that’s front and center because it’s run by women, and yet we get the best of both worlds because we have a lot of good male ideas and energy behind our initiatives.”  

And some of those endeavors can take on a life of their own. People from all over the world converging in Egypt in order to cross the border into Israel to help the people of Gaza . . . Sounds like a stupendous feat meant more for a movie screen, yet a real life attempt was made during the Gaza Freedom March on December 31, 2009. What happened during that initiative and what was CODEPINK’s objective?  

“We had been taking delegations into Gaza through Egypt on smaller levels — about 100 people each time,” Medea explains. “The Gaza Freedom March was an attempt to scale that up. We thought that meant we might get something like 300 people joining, but it turned out that 1,300 people signed up from around the world.”  

Egypt is the route that the delegations have been taking to get into Gaza because the Israelis won’t let them in if they make the attempt within Israel. This particular time the additional people joining the march was a surprise for Egyptian officials. “The event became massive, and that really scared the Egyptian government,” Medea states. “They had been allowing us in with these smaller delegations, but since this one was so big, the government clamped down and said that they would not allow us into Gaza, and they would not allow us to be meeting in Cairo where everybody was converging.”  

The official Egyptian government explanation was that seven or more people gathering would be considered illegal. “So imagine,” Medea adds, “here we were in charge of 1,300 people from all over the world, and we’re told we can’t meet. So it ended up that we had a lot of demonstrations in the streets of Cairo that really shocked and rocked the government there. Because we were coming from so many different countries, officials were too embarrassed to really crack down on us the way they would have if we were Egyptians. As it turned out, they eventually allowed 100 people out of the 1,300 to go into Gaza with humanitarian aid.”  

And what about the possibility of holding another Gaza Freedom March? “What we’re doing now is going back to smaller delegations,” Medea conveys, “more manageable ones. In fact, the next delegation we’re taking will consist of about ten people. In terms of doing something massive, we would prefer doing that in Washington D.C. where we can try to influence the politics of our government and where we have more control over our ability to meet.”  

In the midst of her reflections on the Gaza situation, Medea reveals that it’s difficult to perceive how a resolution will come about. “It’s so hard to see, with the one-sided nature of U.S. policy, how we’re ever going to move in a direction that will give peace to the people who are living there now,” Medea remarks. “I still tend to feel very despairing about the future of that tiny strip of land.”  

Medea also recognizes the need to be lighthearted from time to time to alleviate the gravity. “We did a little parody of the peace talks in front of the White House the other day [Peace Charade 2010]. I play Hillary Clinton. We try to have some fun with this stuff so we don’t get too despairing. Doing protest after protest all the time — it can become overwhelming.”  

As the world watches the Israeli/Palestinian dilemma, many of us wonder what is happening among the women of Israel—Jewish and Islamic—with regard to their own ventures toward peace. Are more peace groups forming and are some of them working directly with CODEPINK?  

“There are a number of wonderful women’s groups,” Medea offers. “There’s one called Coalition of Women for Peace that consists of both Jewish and Arab women. These women have learned over the years how to work really well together. They hosted one of our delegations that went to Israel. At one of the separation walls, we did a very creative protest that consisted of Arab, Jewish, Israeli and American women, calling for the removal of these walls. We basically forced the Israeli military to let us go through one of the checkpoints which had been closed so that we could meet and embrace. It was a very beautiful moment. In general, when protests are led by women, it’s almost guaranteed that it will be peaceful. That really challenges the Israelis in their response, making it harder for them to react with violence.”  

Still, the occupation is affecting women and children on both sides, Israeli as well as Palestinian. “The other day, there was an attack on Israeli settlers that led to the death of four people, including a pregnant woman, and Hamas took credit for it. Credit . . . what a horrible term. It’s awful when you see civilians being killed no matter who they are, and in this case, a pregnant women was murdered. It’s very painful. There’s been worldwide condemnation of that attack, and rightly so. But what I have also seen are daily attacks of women and children in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and in Gaza. As a Jewish American woman, I feel that I have to speak out against those incidences because my government, the Israeli government, and the media tend to belittle the lives of the Palestinians. When a pregnant woman dies at a checkpoint because she was not allowed through to get to the hospital in time, that does not become worldwide news. When a woman in Gaza is killed by an Israeli bomb, that does not become worldwide news. So I feel that we have to speak out against all violence against civilians.”  

There are other ways in which the Israeli occupation, especially the siege, has taken its toll. “In Gaza, where the economy is disastrous, there’s about a fifty percent unemployment rate. So just trying to put food on the table is very difficult for women. Men are feeling impotent because they don’t have jobs and because they don’t feel they’re fulfilling their obligations toward their families. So you also see a rise in domestic violence. All of this, unfortunately, relates back to the lack of basic freedoms.”  

Yet, no matter how often women around the world hear about the situation in Gaza as well as in other conflict zones, it is becoming more imperative that we not only feel the outrage and compassion and desire change, but we actually become forces of that change—basically being less abstract and more concrete. In short, taking it out of our heads and onto the street.  

Medea addresses the concept. “One of the most exciting things for me about CODEPINK has been empowering so many women around the country and around the world to become active because we tend to complain a lot and oftentimes on the computer—writing to each other, bemoaning the state of the world and not getting out to really make change. It’s too easy to be an armchair peacemaker. So we’ve got to get people off their couches and away from their computers and out into the world, be that into the streets or into the halls of congress or into their local shelters helping poor women, wherever that is. We have to be actively engaged in changing this world. Actually, it’s the best possible antidote to depression. It’s very easy to get depressed when you watch the news or you sit around and exchange e-mails about how bad things are going, but it’s very inspiring and refreshing when you get out in the world and try to make change, mostly because you’re surrounded by other women—and men—who are doers rather than talkers. And that is very inspiring.”  

Seems like CODEPINK is appealing to the deeper qualities of women as a whole. There’s a spiritual element to how women are being addressed:   

            We call on women around the world to rise up and oppose the war in Iraq. We call on mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters, on workers, students, teachers, healers, artists, writers, singers, poets, and every ordinary outraged woman willing to be outrageous for peace. Women have been the guardians of life-not because we are better or purer or more innately nurturing than men, but because the men have busied themselves making war. Because of our responsibility to the next generation, because of our own love for our families and communities and this country that we are a part of, we understand the love of a mother in Iraq for her children, and the driving desire of that child for life. — Starhawk  

CODEPINK calls women to break free from learned roles and become more of what many consider to be spiritual activists. It seems to be a revolutionary call in its most positive sense.  

“It’s a call that really involves all aspects of our lives,” Medea relates. “How can we be nurturing in our homes and out in the world, how can we be compassionate in our communities and build a government that reflects that compassion? How can we find beauty in our daily lives and bring more beauty to the larger world? So it’s a very holistic kind of call that really looks toward an era of cooperation and negotiation over the use of force, as well as having that sense of cooperative involvement prevail in everything from our homes and families to our government policies and the way we live and work with each other in the broader world.”  

Yet, in order to create an era of national and international responsibility, we cannot avoid asking ourselves a simple question: How are the actions of our government affecting us as people? If we allow leaders to actively support, especially financially and militarily, nations that are consistently involved in human rights violations, we are basically signing our name to their agenda. In essence, we are condoning their actions by not speaking up to refute them and demanding change.   

But is the tide finally turning in our own country? Are men and women in the U.S. getting the message?  

“Yes and no,” Medea states. “I think that there was tremendous energy that people put into overcoming the Bush years and bringing in a new era. We pinned a lot of hopes on Barak Obama and then felt that after that huge rush of energy to get him elected that we did our job and we could go home and relax. That was a huge mistake because, unfortunately, there is no relaxing. This work is a constant. It requires constant involvement and vigilance, and I don’t say that in a negative, exhausting kind of sense. I say that in a positive, energizing sense. We need to remember that when we let down our guard, the forces of violence never lets down theirs, and we can find ourselves back where we were before.”  

It appears that people may have become a little too complacent since the election of Barak Obama, too willing to allow the policies to emanate from Washington instead of from the grassroots? “The energy we used to get rid of the Bush administration should have then been turned into positive energy to force the Obama administration to be the government that we hoped we had elected,” Medea asserts. “Instead, it went from how do we push against something we don’t like, i.e. the Bush administration, to just feeling like the Messiah had come and he’ll take care of it. Let this powerful, wonderful man, Obama, just do his thing and we’ll be okay. I think that, particularly for women, we should have known better, and we should have not let down our guard. Actually, it’s been very difficult for CODEPINK to organize since Obama has come into power. We still want to end the wars and bring our troops home. We still want to close the foreign military bases that we have–over 800 bases around the world–and invest that money in green energy, good jobs and education. We still want to have our government support basic human rights and close down Guantanamo and restore habeas corpus. There’s all kinds of things that we still have left to do, and yet we haven’t found the same energy among our supporters that we had during the Bush years.”  

Whether we hear it through the media or during town hall discussions, people have expressed a sense of deflation.  

“They certainly feel let down,” Medea concurs. “First they were elated. ‘Okay, let’s let Obama do it for us.’ And then when he didn’t do what we wanted, whether that was ending the wars or bringing in new policies that we desired on everything from jobs to the environment to immigration, we got disappointed and depressed. That’s not good for us as individuals and it’s not good for making the changes we want to see. That’s why CODEPINK is constantly out there trying to revive people’s sense of being active, engaged, and involved. Presently, we’re part of a big mobilization [One Nation: Working Together to Fund Jobs, Not War] that’s taking place on October 2nd in Washington, D.C. It’s being organized by civil rights groups and unions, and we’re bringing the peace message into that mix. It will definitely be bigger than Glen Beck’s and certainly not as white,” Medea adds. “The point is rather than just complaining about Glen Beck, we had to ask ourselves: How do we mobilize forces for what we believe in?”  

Perhaps part of the answer lies within a simpler framework—how men and women can become more pink.  

That may sound a bit too simple, maybe even frivolous. After all, when one thinks pink one does not normally think strong or unwavering. Perhaps, as CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin concludes, the color pink has taken on a special meaning and force.  

“Wearing some pink helps,” Medea says. “We had a lot of people who hated pink when we started who have now come to really love it, including me. I was not a pink person at all. I’ve learned a lot from the whole pink thing. It sort of brightens up my outlook a little more. People’s responses are certainly a lot more positive. Sometimes doing and saying something dressed in black tends to put out a little more of a dire, negative energy than if you’re conveying the same message dressed in pink. The color can be very disarming. It can disarm the police, it can pacify your adversaries, and it can make people want to join you because it’s more inviting and positive. So I would say in general, while we’re working on these issues of life and death, rape and violence, and so many other negative and heartbreaking conditions in the world, adding a little pink can bring some joy into our work.”  

That may be worth contemplating. After all, pink is the color of universal love . . . the color of approachability, harmony and inner peace. The color pink is connected with the heart, our source of compassion and human decency. It’s even been known to neutralize violent behavior—definitely a desirable result.  

Maybe we do need a color-coded, wake-up call:  The heart of humanity is blocked, causing fear, anger, and hatred. In short, it’s causing war.  

So pink may be the warning color we require, detangling us from the knots of domination and greed that have enabled us to squander human life. Perhaps what we really need is to be saved from our own ignorance.  

Now that’s a CODEPINK alert.  

                                                              ****  

Photo credits:  Introductory photo — Julie Brashares. Medea at the podium — Rae Abileah. All other photos — by permission. 

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Women’s Rights are Human Rights – UNIFEM’S Nanette Braun on Women, Peace & Security

               Violence against women and girls is not inevitable; it persists because it is allowed to persist, and it can be stopped . . . Together, we have the will, the conviction and the means to make the dream of violence-free generations of women and girls a reality.   –   Inés Alberdi, UNIFEM Executive Director

 

Nanette Braun

Women’s rights are, of course, human rights. So why is it that we seem to need to emphasize their reality? The answer lies in the simple fact that women’s rights throughout the world are constantly being violated. Access to education, employment, fair salaries, justice in courts, land and home ownership, physical and sexual safety—within all these spheres women have been discriminated against and violated. Thus, the need for specific laws and policies both created and implemented to uphold women’s rights is an essential factor in their being realized. And that also means we need organizations who are monitoring adherence to the underlying principles of these laws as well as reporting on women’s participation in peacebuilding. 

UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) works toward the advancement of women’s human rights and the achievement of gender equality worldwide. UNIFEM grounds itself on the premise that “it is the fundamental right of every woman to live a life free from discrimination and violence, and that gender equality is essential to achieving development and to building just societies.” 

Nanette Braun, Chief of Communications at UNIFEM, believes this as well. She begins by sharing some of her own background and what eventually brought her to UNIFEM’s door. 

“During my university studies in Germany, the Berlin Wall came down. At the time, I was a journalist writing for mainly German publications. It was a very exciting period—a time of big talks about a new world order, and people were looking very strongly at the United Nations. I thought I would like to join them, so I did an internship with the UN. Eventually, in February 1995 I started working in the Communications area. I first became involved with UN Volunteers, an organization that works with professionals from around the world who support the UN in areas like electoral and humanitarian missions as well as in development related works. As a journalist, I found myself covering UN events like the Conference on Population in Cairo, and since gender issues had always been a strong interest for me, I eventually joined UNIFEM and relocated to New York. That was seven years ago. It appears that the longer I’m with UNIFEM, the more important I find the cause. UNIFEM is a dynamic organization with a very important mandate, and I’m happy to be on board.” 

An important reference for UNIFEM’s work in support of women in conflict and post-conflict situations is UN Security Council Resolution 1325. “Resolution 1325 was a landmark resolution in that it first looked at the impact of war on women and viewed it from a security perspective,” Nanette states. “What we know is that war affects women differently than men. One horrific manifestation of the impact of war on women is the systematic and widespread use of rape—something we know is happening around the world.” 

Resolution 1325 highlights the following issues:   

• The participation of women at all levels of decision-making.
• The protection of women and girls from sexual and gender-based violence
• The prevention of violence again women through the promotion of women’s rights, accountability and law enforcement.
• The mainstreaming of gender perspectives in peace operations

As Nanette reflects on how war impacts women differently, she emphasizes the need to look at related issues such as the process of peace negotiations and the composition of international peacekeeping missions. “There are far too few women involved in these negotiations—negotiations which will directly affect their communities and their country,” Nanette asserts. “Women are not in enough decision-making positions at either the national or the international level.” As noted, in many cases where sexual violence is the heavy fist utilized to beat the enemy, victims need special care. “We know that it makes a big difference for a woman who is a survivor of violence if she can speak to a female officer rather than have to speak with a male. “ 

But are UN resolutions like 1325 really making a difference? “It’s been ten years since Resolution 1325 was created,” Nanette states, “and there were other landmark resolutions that followed. In June 2008, UN Security Council Resolution 1820 focused for the first time specifically on sexual violence in conflict as a threat to international security. And it certainly is. It’s horribly effective. When rape and sexual violence are systematically used as tactics, communities are disrupted. Basically you destroy the social fabric that holds them together. This degradation and humiliation of human beings is what makes populations flee. With regard to the women who are violated, in addition to the shame, there is also the stigma attached to the rape itself and the resulting pregnancy. Women are very often shunned by their families and their communities.” 

The epidemic drama of widespread sexual violence will only be curtailed through watchdog efforts. Follow up resolutions—Security Council Resolution 1820 and 1889—which specifically relate to the two previous ones have resulted in a new UN office headed by Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Margot Wallström. In this newly created position, Ms. Wallström will lead efforts to end conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated against women and children. 

During her presentation as the United Nations’ first Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Ms. Wallström stated: 

In my view, women’s security is the best measure of national security. 1820 acknowledges this. It affirms that steps to prevent and address sexual violence, are also steps to maintain peace and security. In a way, 1820 is itself an answer to the question posed by this panel. While important progress has been made on 1325, sexual violence has continued – even escalated. 1820 represents a sharpened response to a pillar of 1325 that remains woefully weak.

Nanette Braun also indicates that although the last ten years have offered very important developments with regard to Resolution 1325 and the resolutions that followed, there still remains a need to look into how to realize their aims more effectively.

At the moment, UNIFEM is part of an effort do just that—to develop indicators “to improve the ways in which we track and count the impact of conflict on women and their efforts to build peace.” As Nanette explains, “One example of an indicator with regard to Resolution 1325 is the number of female peacekeeping personnel in a given situation—the number of women in peace negotiations, the number of women as mediators. Through the indicator, we can look at the baseline and how things are being monitored. Indicators help us review whether a resolution like 1325 is being implemented, which is a very important aspect of driving this agenda forward.” 

An example of the ground level results of including more women in peacekeeping has already been seen in Liberia. “There is a police contingent of Indian women stationed as part of the peacekeeping mission there. Because it’s made such a difference to the women in the country, and they’ve felt encouraged by it, there is now a deliberate effort in Liberia to increase the number of women in the police force. The women themselves are also coming forward, saying they want to become policewomen. Also, Liberia now has a special unit on sexual and gender-based violence which is very important since it is necessary to have trained personnel in the police who know how to speak to victims properly. You need special training for that. You also need to know the services you can refer the women to. And that’s not only medical services, but also counseling and legal services. In addition, now Liberia also has a special court that only deals with sexual violence crimes.” 

Although Nanette notes that developments like these are extremely encouraging , there is work yet to be done. The goals of Resolution 1325 are still far from being realized. “More efforts have been made through the years,” Nanette remarks, “but I think we haven’t seen as much change as we would have hoped. Yet, the fact that it’s not only Liberia that is trying to increase things like the number of female police officers, and other countries are making similar efforts, is an encouraging development. In Rwanda, UNIFEM has worked very closely with the police and the military on addressing sexual violence so that you now have gender-based violence units within the Rwandan police force and an active campaign in the military as well. This means that both police officers and soldiers are presently being trained with regard to sexual violence issues before they go on peacekeeping missions. Representatives from other countries are actually going to Rwanda to see what the leaders there are doing and how their police force and military are addressing all of these concerns. This is most definitely an achievement. “ 

Another incidence of Resolution 1325 in action was the conference held in Madrid, Advancing Women’s Leadership for Sustainable Peace in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and Worldwide, which was supported by the government of Spain and hosted by UNIFEM and the IWC (International Women’s Commission for Just and Sustainable Israeli-Palestinian Peace). The goal of Israeli, Palestinian and international women leaders who attended the conference was to end the occupation and achieve a two-state solution. “UNIFEM helped by providing a platform for these women to meet and exchange their thoughts, ideas and opinions. It’s very important that there is a dialogue between like-minded women from all sides. This conference highlights how women can be involved in peace negotiations as well as in setting an agenda for the future of their societies.” 

Nanette also notes that during the month of June, in order to commemorate the 10^th Anniversary of Resolution 1325, UNIFEM, together with the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the Department for Political Affairs, and the UN Development Program, has organized Global Open Day for Women and Peace. In more than twenty post-conflict countries, senior UN officials are literally opening their doors to women peace activists and leaders. “This Open Day,” Nanette explains, “ is an opportunity for women to come forward and speak to the heads of peacekeeping missions in their countries and to voice their concerns and their recommendations.” 

UNIFEM has also launched a petition, SAY NO to Sexual Violence Against Women in Conflict, that people around the world can sign which will be used to show global support for the issue of ending violence against women. “There will be a high-level ministerial meeting in October on the 10^th anniversary of Security Council Resolution 1325,” Nanette informs. “Before this meeting takes place we would like to show through these signatures that there is global support for Resolution 1325 and for its implementation. Everyone signing the petition helps make it a more powerful force in assuring that the resolution is carried out.” 

In fact, the history of SAY NO – UNITE TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN is a testament to the dedication of both UNIFEM and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s commitment to prioritize the issue of women’s rights violations as well as resolving the dilemma. 

“SAY NO started in November 2007 as a signature campaign,” Nanette relates. “UNIFEM put out a global call to make ending violence against women a top policy priority because it’s become an issue of pandemic proportions. This violence exists within every country throughout the world. It has nothing to do with whether that country is of the global north or the global south, rich or poor. We also realized that what was needed was something stipulated in the framework of the UN Secretary-General’s campaign on the issue. You need laws. You need national plans with enough resources to implement these laws and policies. You need more data, and you need more public events and more social mobilization. Also, you very much need to address the actual violence in conflict. So what UNIFEM did through the signature campaign was to appeal to policymakers around the world, requesting they make ending violence against women a top priority in their work. The response was astounding. Within a year, we had more than 5,000,000 signatures. Even many parliamentarians—the whole Tanzanian Parliament, for example— signed the petition.” 

When lawmakers publically express their will and intention to act on an issue, it’s a powerful statement. Nanette expressed UNIFEM was a bit overwhelmed, although positively, by the response. “We thought we would stop after a year,” Nanette divulged. “We were then urged by many of our partner organizations to continue, but to continue in a slightly different way. As I mentioned, the UN Secretary-General had launched a campaign on the issue, UNITE TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. It was at that historic moment that we realized how we could bring our own constituency to the Secretary-General’s initiative. That brought us to the second phase of SAY NO which we call SAY NO—UNITE TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. “ 

And SAY NO-UNITE focuses on action—individual and group. “UNIFEM’s partners wanted to be able to publicize the different advocacy actions occurring throughout the world. This resulted in providing partners with tools to build their own web sites, thereby getting the message out to more and more people. Obviously a web site allows even the smallest group to make others aware of the issues as well as to basically alert people to events that they are organizing. So now, if you fundraise you can talk about it. If you go to schools, like in Thailand, and start to interact with the school children and develop a curriculum together with the authorities, then others can be aware of that action. In the end, it all feeds back into the global whole.” 

And that’s the crux of the idea—individual and small group empowerment—linking the local to the global. “Being inspired and encouraged by what others are doing is an important aspect of building a web site and using the advocacy tools UNIFEM provides. If you find a particular action interesting, you can then replicate it. It’s a kind of cross fertilization. It also gives a platform for small, local initiatives that are driven by individuals. They can now reach a global audience.” 

UNIFEM has also seen the SAY NO project embraced by the European Parliament. “They took SAY NO as an occasion to adopt a declaration of zero tolerance on violence against women,” Nanette states, “and to call for an International Year within the European Union on ending this violence. So that is a breakthrough. It was adopted by the parliament through a majority decision so we knew that meant the parliamentarians were fully behind it. Eva-Britt Svensson, chair of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality has been instrumental in driving this agenda. She says that through the engagement on SAY NO, there is a new awareness within the European Parliament. Her own testament actually involved a quite moving moment. When the declaration was adopted in the European Parliament, she gave an interview and basically talked for the first time about the fact that she was a violence survivor herself which is why she is so strongly behind this agenda. Actually, on the SAY NO site, we have an interview and video of Ms. Svensson. She is a very avid supporter of women who have been in the same situation and gives them a lot of encouragement. Of course, in her function as a parliamentarian in the European Parliament, she is now able to carry this agenda forward .” 

And highlighting such an important message is of great importance. Nanette recognizes that no organization can stand alone and UNIFEM has a number of partnerships—enabling them to strengthen the advancement of gender equality through collective power. 

“One strong relationship we have is with Amnesty International,” Nanette mentions. “Amnesty has their own campaign on ending violence against women and has reached out to all their chapters. So basically, we’ve joined forces on that agenda. We’re also working with The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, The World YWCA, and a number of other groups. In the end, you can only work on an issue of this magnitude and drive it forward effectively if you have a network of partners. 

Making people more aware of these types of issues can be difficult. UNIFEM’s Goodwill Ambassadors—persons of international stature from the world of art, music, film, sports and literature—volunteer their time to accent important agendas to the public. Celebrated and famous individuals such as HRH Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol of Thailand, HRH Princess Basma bint Talal of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and Hon. Mrs. Phoebe Asiyo, Chair of the Women’s Political Caucus of Kenya and Member of the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission, work tirelessly to advance gender equality. Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman, also a Goodwill Ambassador, is the spokesperson for the SAY NO-UNITE initiative. “We are very happy to have her on board as a Goodwill Ambassador who supports this cause so strongly,” Nanette says. 

Yet, although fame offers a powerful platform to proclaim the need for advocacy, all of us can use our voices to highlight and resolve a devastating and horrendous practice—the sexual violation of women and girls as a military tactic. And it’s all the more imperative that we do. Let us remember that those violating women have their own public platform—a world stage where they voice their agenda loudly and forcefully. They know that in the wake of war, a raped woman is a potent message: 

Flee or there’ll be others like her. We can get to your women, we can get to your soul. 

If we are to attain peace anywhere it means we must protect that soul. In the sphere of human rights, Nanette reminds us that “women’s rights are violated more often and to a larger extent. But in essence, we are still talking about the same thing. There is no divide. Women’s rights are human rights.” 

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HONORING ELEANOR ROOSEVELT – Carol Hillman Discusses a Legacy Revered and Protected

Carol Hillman and Hildie

Eleanor Roosevelt’s message will always be relevant. A woman of power, a woman of influence, and a woman of principle, the resonance of Eleanor’s persona only seems to strengthen with time.

Today’s young women appear to be discovering Eleanor anew, and organizations like Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt—a project of Save America’s Treasures—are making certain that her legacy is protected as well as promoted. Founded by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1998, Save America’s Treasures, a public-private partnership which includes the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service, aims to preserve the documents, structures and inspiring works of art that are a part of our American heritage.

Carol Hillman, chair of Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt, recounts how the organization began. “Hillary Clinton asked Claudine Bacher, our founding chair, to oversee the project. Claudine then spoke to others including my mother, Elsa Resika, to get them on board. Not long before my mother passed away, she urged me to join in.”

The project, as Carol explains, consists of restoring and preserving Eleanor’s Val-Kill home in Hyde Park, NY as well as educating visitors to the historic site about her vast contributions. “Our goal is to ensure that new generations of American’s understand and carry on Mrs. Roosevelt’s legacy.”

Incredibly, the history of that legacy includes both how her mother as well as Carol was affected by Eleanor.

“My mother met Eleanor Roosevelt at a reception in New York City in honor of the play Sunrise at Campobello. Mom had Mrs. Roosevelt autograph a program and then sent it to me at the University of Wisconsin where I was studying. A year or so later, I hosted Mrs. Roosevelt at the university,” Carol relates with a sense of awe. “We invited her to speak and she arrived in a blizzard — the pilot told her she might not land in Madison but in Minneapolis instead. Nonetheless, she took the flight. She told the pilot she had 1300 students waiting for her and she would attempt to get to Madison, which she did. I met her at the airport with Governor Gaylord Nelson. As it turned out, her speech, which I chaired in the Memorial Union Theater, was a rousing success. It was packed to the hilt —standing room only.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, a strong and determined spirit, always did her best to deliver. Inspiring others—especially new generations of young people—to emulate Eleanor’s sense of integrity and her passion for justice drives Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt, an organization of dedicated volunteers, to publicly acclaim Eleanor’s legacy, not only through the preservation of her Val-Kill home but through various media projects and events. In particular, the prestigious Following in Her Footsteps Award, highlights a life of public service, lived in pursuit of social justice, peace, human rights and gender equality – some of the groundswells upon which Eleanor Roosevelt rose to proclaim her ideals.

“Our Following in Her Footsteps Award really honors women who have taken on causes that were also very important to Eleanor Roosevelt such as women’s issues, health care, preservation of the environment, and human rights,” Carol Hillman explains. “In 2009, we bestowed the award to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for all of her work regarding health care reform, helping women and children, as well as her work in international relations.”

Secretary of State Clinton is not only the founder of Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt, but also a formidable political leader. The former First Lady has forged new horizons in the area of gender equality, and like Eleanor, presents a strong and determined presence, one which encourages intelligent and practical solutions.

Women’s issues, including their leadership roles within all areas of human affairs in the U.S. and internationally, has been a central theme for Secretary Clinton. In March of 2009, along with President Obama, Secretary Clinton introduced a new position: ambassador-at-large for Global Women’s Issues, an office at the Department of State which works toward the empowerment of women at all levels – politically, economically and socially. Melanne Verveer is the first to fill this unprecedented seat. Secretary Clinton’s vision, as was Eleanor’s, works toward the empowerment of women and recognizes the importance of their leadership in all walks of life.

Carol Hillman also reflects on this issue, especially regarding how more female leadership can strengthen our chances of really establishing and securing human rights. “I think if you look at Mrs. Roosevelt, who said you must do the thing you think you cannot do, women are willing to do that and to collaborate, to compromise where appropriate and to take personal risks. These qualities, I believe, will help us achieve peace and human rights.” In her years as a businesswoman, Carol has seen this in action. “We tend to allow for more possibilities with regard to solutions. We’re a little more open to things having more than one answer. ”

Yet, women still have a way to go with regard to equality and being more established as leaders—politically, socially and in the business world. Carol offers one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s quotes as a voice of advice.

          Women must become more conscious of themselves as women and of their ability to function as a group. At the same time, they must try to wipe from men’s consciousness the need to consider them as a group or as women in their everyday activities, especially as workers in industry or the professions.

Although Eleanor Roosevelt indicates that women must join forces in accomplishing their goals, she also stresses they must remain individuals in the workplace and in the world at large, so they can establish themselves on their own merit wherever they apply their talents.

But still, as we all know, outspoken women such as Eleanor Roosevelt are criticized harshly at times, even threatened. Carol remarks on how Eleanor is an example for women today even in this regard. “As she was being driven through West Virginia toward her speaking engagements, Eleanor knew the Klan was out and about. She rode past KKK rallies determined to reach her destination no matter what. Now that’s courage.”

And Eleanor consistently asserted that bravery and determination in numerous, unconventional ways, blazing a trail for women’s rights. “In the 1920’s, Eleanor joined the League of Women Voter’s,” Carol points out. “She spoke in favor of contraception availability. She advocated for fair wages for women. Her My Day column was unprecedented.”

In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt was the first woman radio commentator as well as the first woman to write a syndicated column. She also proved innovative in how she employed her power to help establish women in what were male-dominated fields. When FDR became president Eleanor made certain women were involved in the process of establishing the New Deal. She ingeniously held countless press conferences which were only open to female journalists. The result: news organizations had to hire female reporters or they would be left out of the loop.

This ability to brilliantly manifest her ideas by acting simply and directly became Eleanor Roosevelt’s trademark. Her advocacy of women’s rights expanding into human rights, Eleanor’s vista grew even wider with what many consider her crowning achievement. As chairperson for the Human Rights Commission, she helped foster the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which sets the highest standard for human dignity and freedom. The commission’s goal was to create a document that would help prevent another world war and establish an international criteria for human rights recognition which would compel abiding nations to protect these rights.

As quoted in a 2009 Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt newsletter, Secretary of State Clinton made the following statement which appears appropriate for America’s present day challenges. “We can all follow in Eleanor’s footsteps . . . The America that inspired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the America that we love and treasure, is still the shining hope of the world . . .” 

Still, with all of our nation’s current difficulties—the financial crisis, the disastrous Gulf oil dilemma—following in Eleanor Roosevelt’s footsteps would certainly be leading us down a different road. Respect for individual rights would be a foundational element with regard to much-needed policy changes.

“Something like the BP situation probably wouldn’t have happened if we were utilizing Eleanor Roosevelt’s vision for a just society,” Carol Hillman states. “More than likely, more government regulations would be in place. If she had anything to do with policy today, she would look after the people and would feel that the companies involved in such a terrible disaster needed to be accountable.”

Keeping Eleanor’s view in mind, it would also appear she would not have been too happy with our current immigration law difficulties. Carol cites Eleanor’s response to “the self-styled crusader” Gerald L.K. Smith in her My Day column back in 1953, where Eleanor took on, one-by-one, several points made by the clergyman and politician regarding his view of an ideal America.

          The next point would stop all immigration into our country on the basis that there are only enough jobs for Americans and only enough houses for Americans. We built this country on the labor of immigrants and on the humanitarian principles that the Statue of Liberty personifies. We said we were a haven for the oppressed of the world. We can no longer open our doors as we did in the early days because ours is now a highly developed nation, but we are still able to preserve some of our humanitarianism and to profit by the skills and the strength of a certain amount of immigration. It would be wrong, I think, to say that we should take no one into our country from now on.

Carol Hillman and Founding Chair, Claudine Bacher

Controversial . . . outspoken . . . gutsy. Eleanor Roosevelt embodied what many women today aspire to become. And most of us agree: Eleanor’s message is timeless. In October of 2009, at the 125th anniversary of Eleanor’s birthday, Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt’s Chair Carol Hillman and Founding Chair Claudine Bacher placed a wreath at the former First Lady’s gravesite in Hyde Park — an act not only reflecting their deep respect and esteem but also conveying their promise as guardians of Eleanor’s legacy.

And the “First Lady of the World” deserves such deference. As Carol explains, “She stood for the progression of women’s rights. Eleanor would have also wanted to see more care taken of women and children not only in this country but abroad as well.”

          In numbers there is strength, and we in America must help the women of the world.                                                     –MY DAY, October 22, 1946

Could our present First Lady set more of an example with regard to upholding that view. Could Michelle Obama use her position, as Eleanor did, to promote women’s issues?

“My hope is that the First Lady expands her horizons a bit more,” Carol asserts. “It would be good if Michelle Obama invested time into looking at issues regarding the women and children of the world, how they are taken care of in crisis situations, as well as health care and education.” Carol also expresses that if would also be beneficial to see the First Lady involved in preservation work as well. No doubt, Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt’s door would always be open and eager for her involvement.

But at the same time, we do not need to be the First Lady or a famous political leader to help make a difference.

          Let us remember that international achievement, nevertheless, depends on individual achievement, that what we achieve in our own surroundings will spread out like the ripples when we throw a pebble in an unruffled pool. So no one can say what happens to an individual is unimportant, for no one knows how some individual act may ripple out even into international channels.                                                                                        –Eleanor Roosevelt

Carol also reminds us that no effort is insignificant. “There is no small achievement,” Carol remarks. “Everyone has a part to play and that means each person can contribute. We cannot undervalue what anyone does since it becomes a part of the collective effort.”

Only by moving together can we achieve our greatest vision. Eleanor Roosevelt asserted as much. Even the establishment of human rights begins “in small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

Calling us to clarity, Eleanor’s words are succinct and unaffected. Today, her voice resounds through those who, like Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt’s Carol Hillman, uphold her ideals and principles. Gracious and deferential, Carol offers her hope and vision for the future. “I think Eleanor’s comment that ‘staying aloof is not a solution, but a cowardly evasion’ says it all. We must get involved and do the things we think we cannot do for the good of humanity, the world, and our country.”

In a world where evasion is a keyword in our Search Engine, as easy to attain as a push of a button, Eleanor’s assertion is a timeless one. “Eleanor Roosevelt was a passionate patriot as well as a world leader,” Carol affirms. “Her message to all is to take action, get involved, take risks . . . and do the right thing.”

Perhaps that’s exactly what we need. A simple directive from a fearless woman who took on the world as her own.

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