Sexuality and Feminity
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2010 - Seven Who Build Autonomy
Profiles of seven outstanding leaders dedicated to improving women"s lives: Nell Merlino, Oraia Reid, Edit Schlaffer, Pernessa Seele, Eveline Shen, Jennifer Blei Stockman and Jen Taylor Friedman. Nell Merlino, Connector for Capital Ideas "Think big." Nell Merlino has been telling women that for two decades--big enough to grow your business to $1 million in revenue, and big enough to join the 71 million people who have participated in Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Merlino, founder of Count Me In for Women"s Economic Independence, has taken on the mission to help women make their big ideas real. She launched the microlending program in 1999 to help women start their own businesses, but soon realized that she also wanted to help them expand their businesses. She refocused the organization to aid female entrepreneurs take their businesses past the $1 million revenue mark, an achievement that less than 3 percent of female business owners have reached. In response, the Make Mine a Million $ Business Award was born. These efforts were based on Merlino"s original work of creating a program for parents in the workplace to talk with their daughters about their careers. In the early 1990s, she was tapped by the Ms. Foundation for Women to help with a campaign for improving the self-esteem of adolescent girls. After attending her father"s retirement dinner and realizing how important learning about his career in the New Jersey State Senate had been to her, she and the foundation developed the idea for Take Our Daughters to Work Day. The successful campaign started in 1993. "I thought, "Wouldn"t it be cool if other girls had the opportunity to understand their parents" work?"" Merlino says, adding that it was equally important for bosses and employees to see all the young women who would be joining them someday. After seeing the positive response to Take Our Daughters to Work Day, Merlino"s longtime interest in seeing women ascend the ranks of business grew. "No group in history has ever spent their way to power," Merlino says. "We have to be more focused on the creation and retention of wealth. I think it"s the last frontier for women." For the Make Mine a Million $ Business Award, female business owners across the country apply and present their business pitch to a live audience of judges and peers. They compete for a package of prizes--including business coaching, financing, support from corporate partners, publicity and products--and membership in a community dedicated to helping them take their businesses to the next level. "It"s about moving women out of thinking small and giving them the confidence to succeed." Merlino says encouraging female entrepreneurs will also affect women as consumers, since many of the Make Mine a Million winners and contestants design businesses that cater to other women or underrepresented groups. "Think about what would happen if a larger number of products were designed with women in mind," Merlino says. "The possibilities are endless. I am seeing that in terms of the level of pent-up innovation that we have in 51 percent of the population." With more women signing up for the Make Mine a Million contest--more than 5,000 have applied to date, with over 140 winners--Merlino says her next goal is getting the larger business world to pay attention to these up-and-coming female entrepreneurs and help tap their potential. --Sarah Seltzer Oraia Reid, Driver of Women"s Safety Oraia Reid took note of an increase in assaults of women in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Being a survivor of sexual assault herself, she started offering free late-night rides home in her car to help lower the risk of being attacked. "I just wanted to get everyone home safely," Reid says. This sentiment inspired Reid to start RightRides for Women"s Safety, a New York nonprofit organization she co-founded in August 2004 and now serves as its executive director. Today, RightRides has more than 150 volunteers and a partnership with Zipcar, which donates nine cars each week. The program is dedicated to building safer communities by eliminating sexual assault and violence. It offers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, along with women and gender nonconforming individuals, a free late-night ride home to ensure a safe commute in high-risk areas throughout the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Since its inception, RightRides has served more than 2,500 customers. Reid says RightRides is so important because the service is "here for people, even if they are walking two blocks." She recalls a young woman who fought off an attacker after getting lost trying to get home. The young woman had the RightRides number in her cell phone directory, but did not call for a ride. "She became a volunteer because of that experience and to encourage people to not wait to call RightRides," Reid says. "RightRides can and should be utilized." RightRides for Women"s Safety is also a founding member of New Yorkers for Safe Transit, an initiative to increase safety measures and reduce sexual harassment and assault in subways and at bus stops. In 2008, New Yorkers for Safe Transit secured an anti-harassment poster campaign and public service announcements that are heard in subway cars throughout the New York City subway system. RightRides intends to open chapters in cities such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C., within the next year. "We"ve heard from people all over the world who want to bring RightRides to their city," Reid says. "RightRides perpetuates a message of empowerment that truly anyone can make social change happen." Under Reid"s leadership, RightRides for Women"s Safety has received several civic awards, including a mayoral proclamation from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Rising Star Award from The New York Women"s Agenda and the Susan B. Anthony Award from the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women. In 2009, RightRides was honored by the Stonewall Community Foundation and also received a Union Square Award. --Lauren Trapanotto Edit Schlaffer, Transformer Across National Boundaries The concept of social justice motivated Edit Schlaffer to use her skills as a social scientist to collect evidence about women in countries of crisis and transition. In 2002, the former sociology lecturer founded Women without Borders, an action-oriented global think tank, to empower women as agents of change. Schlaffer grew up on a farm in Austria idolizing two women: her grandmother, who taught her to believe in herself, and Bertha von Suttner, the Austrian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate who over 100 years ago rang the alarm bells in a poetic and persuasive way: "The stars of eternal truth and right have always shone in the firmament of human understanding." To bring those stars down to Earth and translate this truth into reality are the ongoing inspirations for Schlaffer and her work. She is convinced that women do have a deeper understanding of relationships because they are instrumental for weaving the fabrics of their societies together. Schlaffer has designed a number of groundbreaking projects focused on building female self-confidence as a key tool in establishing a female powerbase in countries that are transitioning from tradition to modernity, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and India. These projects include realizing girls" football teams in Rwanda to enhance empowerment and trauma healing, hosting basketball games for Afghan girls to celebrate their liberty and teaching swimming classes to women in the South Indian tsunami region. "These programs were successful in challenging women to become competent and active participants in rebuilding their communities," Schlaffer says. Women without Borders is setting the stage for new conversations and debates about violent extremism. In 2008 Schlaffer created SAVE Sisters Against Violent Extremism, the first women"s counter-terrorism platform. Headquartered at the Women without Borders offices in Vienna, SAVE brings together a broad spectrum of women determined to create a united front against violent extremism. The goal of SAVE is to provide women with tools to critically debate and challenge extremist thinking, as well as to develop alternative strategies to combat terrorism. "SAVE links the collective female know-how to create a new sisterhood for a world without violent extremism," Schlaffer says. SAVE started chapters in India, Spain, Northern Ireland, Yemen and the United Kingdom and launched two global campaigns: "Schools and Students Against Violent Extremism" and "Mothers for Change." These campaigns provide the young generation and mothers who raise the next generation with constructive alternatives to the subversive appeal of extremist ideologies. "Women have found effective ways of resolving conflicts from Northern Ireland to Liberia," she says. "Their actors were not generals and military strategists, but women with compassion who decided to listen to the other side." --Bijoyeta Das Pernessa C. Seele, Ambassador for Communities with AIDS Pernessa Seele knows that for the HIV-AIDS rates to drop in African American communities, a wide-ranging discussion must sweep through the neighborhoods at a rate far faster than the virus can spread. As the founder of the Balm in Gilead, she wants to help jump-start the conversation. "Most women are getting the disease from their heterosexual partners, so we need men to begin to talk about this disease in a frank and truthful way," Seele says. "And we need women to help men have that dialogue." While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the overall HIV-AIDS diagnoses among African Americans declined in 2007--the most recent data available--the rate of AIDS diagnoses for black women was 22 times higher than that for white women. African Americans accounted for 51 percent of the 42, 655 new HIV-AIDS diagnosesPages: [1] 2 3