Hello World!
Launching my website while the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds
Welcome to my new website! This is a space to capture the work I’m doing with Mass NOW, Suffrage100MA, Boston Pride & the LGBTQ Youth Commission and the ‘thought leadership’ behind the movement building work throughout these growing coalitions. Scroll all the way down to sign up for my newsletter and stay tuned for upcoming events!
On March 1st Mass NOW launched our long awaited 'Join Mass NOW’ video in the hopes of recruiting 100 new members this month. I had half a dozen speaking engagements lined up, was planning on launching my website the first week of March and then, overnight COVID-19 brought our world to a holt and everything was canceled.
The one event that was not canceled was a Facebook Live Interview with my good friend and founder of Main Paige Media, Paige Burns. Click here to watch me explain exactly what it is I do as a ‘Social Movement Leader’ and why I’m more grateful now than ever before to be working to reform our broken systems so they work for everyone.
“I see the movement-building work, the structural change work that I have taken this risk to center in my career is more timely now than ever before as a lot of our institutions are taking a look around to see how do we actually support our workers and families in 2020.”
“Social distancing and our current state of emergency is necessary to address the COVID-19 pandemic, but we also know that if mishandled, it is a slippery slope to watching our rights and freedoms disappear. It is more important now than ever before to stay connected.”
We are convening feminist community online, coordinating menstrual product donation drives around Massachusetts and turned our period poverty lobby day into a Menstrual Equity Coalition Briefing. The pandemic has also spurred me to start hosting weekly meeting with NOW State Presidents across the country to share information on how we can move our organizing online and respond to the growing threats to abortion and many of our key issues.
Upon realizing we wouldn’t be able to hold most if not all of our programming for the rest of the fiscal year, the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth created a grant application for organizations and individuals serving LGBTQ Youth and awarded $18,000 in emergency grants to combat the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on LGBTQ youth.
Check out both the Commission’s website & Boston Pride’s Statement to the Community for LGBTQ related emergency resources.
Suffrage100MA Coalition Kickoff in November 2019 at the Massachusetts State House.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Suffrage100MA’s work to honor the suffragist’s legacy and our commitment to voting is more important than ever. In the last couple of weeks, voting has been interrupted in seven states and in Massachusetts, four special primary elections were scheduled to take place on March 31st. Although in-person events are canceled for the foreseeable future, Suffrage100MA has been busy traveling around the Commonwealth and has participating in forty-six suffrage centennial events this year already!
In November, we convened our Partner organizations at the Massachusetts State House to begin planning a huge commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to be held in the fall of 2020. We have continued to grow our diverse coalition of nearly 170 nonprofit and nonpartisan Partners, including social justice and educational organizations, cultural institutions, and more. Click here to learn more about how nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations can become a Suffrage100MA Partner and click here to read Suffrage100MA’s Letter to the Community.
Thank you for reading and sign up to my monthly newsletter below!
“When you’re working for yourself you can only put your energy into things that give you back energy. This is the ecosystem of our work, how we value our own labor. The fact that this work continues to energize me is the proof I need to know this is the right work to be doing.”
