Live Blogging: National Council for Research on Women Annual Conference

Hey crew. I’m here in New York City at the NCRW Annual Conference. I’ll be live blogging all the sessions for the rest of the day, with a few other posts thrown in. The first session that I’m attending is Youth: Opportunities and Challenges for Building Pipelines for Leadership.
Supriya Pillai, Executive Director (ED) of the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing:
1. Youth leaders already exist. We need to recognize that.
2. Youth leadership has to come from the inside. Young people of color need to be empowered to make change for themselves, in their own communities, in the best way they see fit.
3. Discussions around a leadership pipeline are not new. We need to start investing at the high school age, looking at young people of color as the engine for that pipeline.
4. Youth organizing is the best “after-school program.” In winning and losing, especially losing, young people gain self-efficacy early on and learn about collective momentum.
She then talks about the example of Inner City Struggle in LA, which “goes beyond conversations about diversity to attack structural racism.” Communities for Educational Equality. Their demand: young people of color need college. It is a human right. They created a curriculum called “A to G,” designed to be a mandatory college prep course.
Major victories: the curriculum is passing statewide in California and they’re trying to take it national. The key to their success has been young people organizing with their parents.
Supriya is amazing! I’m totally crushing on her.
Next is Kim Salmond from the Girls Scouts of the USA.
After a big new survey with girls about leadership, they have articulated a new framework for girls’ leadership: Discover, connect, and take action. They are moving away from the typical Girl Scout model to a more deeply articulated approach that looks at the systemic influences in girls’ lives. Only 9% of girls flat out reject the idea of becoming a leader themselves.
They’re seeing a lack of urgency about women’s leadership. Many see the change as “all done.” The majority of boys and girls surveyed said that they wouldn’t be disappointed if there wasn’t a woman president anytime soon.
Next is Sally Stevens, ED of the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona.

Sally is talking about her work with low-income women of color, ages 13-17, who are often struggling with substance abuse problems. They’re trying to bring girls together to think about policies in schools and their communities that might support them to stay healthy and help prevent the next generation from falling into some of the same traps. Unfortunately I feel like Sally isn’t really laying out the ways in which her program cultivates the girls’ leadership (it’s sounding as if these ideas are pretty top-down).
“We’re trying to work from a systems point of view while empowering the girls on the ground to really advance where the girls end up in their young 20s.”
Sounds like U of A students also mentor the younger girls through the resource center on campus.
Next up is Ellen Siber from the Graduate School of Social Service at Fordham University.
For 35, years, she taught french literature and women’s studies at Marymount College. In 2000, “the big bad male university” bought Marymount. In 2006, they closed it, claiming that the “women of Marymount aren’t smart enough.” They saved one program-Mentoring Latinas, known to its participants as Club Amigas.
“I think that God, if he or she exists, was both with me and against me today. I left my briefcase with my notes for my talk in a cab. Never has this happened to me before. However, I’m going to tell you a personal story so it’s all in my head.”

Some of the things that I’ve learned in the last six years:
1. Only 1 in 5 Latinas graduates from H.S. in four years.
2. Latinas’ suicide rate is 17-21%, 150% higher than any other group of girls.
3. 1 in 4 Latinas under 20 will become pregnant or has been pregnant.

“But I’ve also learned that when Latinas have their dreams nurtured, they become scientists, physicians, lawyers, and guess what, judges.”
She talks about the importance of consistency–when the college student mentors miss a session with the middle school girl, it creates a real issue of trust. She talks about the frustration of the bureaucracy at Fordham and trying to get foundation money (foundations want to fund large projects that indirectly serve rather than small projects that directly serve).
I’m wondering what Ellen’s ethnic background is–simply because her own experiences and cultural socialization certainly affects her approach to the program and the girls. It’s interesting that she didn’t mention it. To me, it feels like she’s really seeing these girls as a population very much outside of herself…sort of objectifying them and their issues rather than letting them speak through her about the challenges they face.
Liz Abzug is going off about how women apologize before they speak at Barnard College (where I went) when she teaches courses on women and leadership. She’s saying that young women need to learn their feminist history. (I’ve heard her do this riff many, many times.) She also mentions that older women need to let younger women manifest their own style of leadership, but doesn’t elaborate on what that might look like.
Supriya is talking about how in the late 90s, racial justice organizers were able to shift young people of color from being seen as “super predators” to youth organizers, and now we need to shift again to see them as leaders.
Laura, my buddy and I, downloaded afterwards and talked about our frustration with women’s leadership programs that act like there is only one version of female leadership. Of course it sucks to apologize before you speak, but we also need to make sure that women are allowed to manifest different styles of leadership, some of them introspective or quieter. Laura said she likes to take a little time to process and tends to be a bit more shy, but it doesn’t mean that she’s not a leader. I totally agree.