Dare to Write an Op-Ed…via Chicago!

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” – Audre Lorde

According to the OpEd Project only 21% of the bylines in the nation’s top oped forums are by women. This is in stark contrast to the 79% of men whose viewpoints help bend the wide arch of public perception and opinion. Audre Lorde’s statement remains of great relevance when we think about the gender disparity that exists between men and women not only in the professional sector but also in public discourse.

The OpEd’s Project’s core seminar – “Write to Change the World” – was designed to help offset this trend and to increase the range of voices by inspiring and empowering women (and those from underrepresented groups) to embrace their unique worldviews and to write op-eds.

As the new Chicago-based regional management intern, I was invited to participate in the appropriately titled and highly interactive seminar on Saturday, April 28. Organized in partnership with The Medill School at Northwestern University and Make it Better, “Write to Change the World” was led by Deborah Siegel and Michele Weldon: the Midwest regional seminar leaders.

Siegel and Weldon steered a room of nineteen women (including myself) and one man through a self-reflection process that reminded us of the power that our individual voices hold. I sat in awe as we opened with introductions and I listened to each participant describe his or her professional achievements. From a published and well-traveled spoken word artist to an award-winning film producer to several entrepreneurs leading a successful business or national grassroots campaign, I was undoubtedly sitting in a room with some bold and powerful people.

Then we were asked to engage in an activity that required us to define our expertise. The tone in our voices immediately changed to one of uncertainty. We remained modest or willingly pushed ourselves to the margins when it came to listing our accomplishments. For example, one participant stated, “I’m a behind the scenes person.”

At one point Weldon asked me whether I had ever won any awards for my writings and I convincingly responded that I had not despite the fact that it is not true. I have been awarded several research and writing grants, am a three-time public policy debate city champion, and most recently was named an alternate for a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship to Morocco. None of these accomplishments surfaced to mind when I was asked to acknowledge my efforts, and it was certainly the case for others as well. (A memorable quote of the day was offered by a participant who stated, “Oh, and I have a Ph.D.!”). As Siegel declared, when it comes to our shiny baubles and our qualifications, we need to “own it!”

Through this activity, which required that we answer what our name is, what we are experts in and why, we learned that there is value in the ability to hone and narrow down our expertise, and that this does not mean that we can’t be multihyphenates. We can and need to be unabashed experts and visionaries in multiple arenas.

The second half of the seminar walked us through the elements of an evidenced based argument that facilitated our comprehension of how to write a cogent and authoritative op-ed. After breaking out into small groups that allowed participants to interrogate each other’s arguments and provide critical feedback, we left with a solid outline for our first pieces.

The seminar was followed by a happy-hour at the neighboring Elephant & Castle where we were able to dialogue about the day’s realizations and to make personal connections.

In the end, the “Write to Change the World” seminar illuminated an important fact that the OpEd Project’s founder and guest visitor Catherine Orenstein highlighted: that we can do this because there is room for our voices, for us.

So let us own our voices and our strengths in the service of our visions. Let us dare to be powerful. Let us dare to write that first op-ed!

Rockin’ NYC Core Seminar – April 28, 2012

The OpEd Project had a great group of seminar participants today! The bunch included media personalities, activists, pundits, and thought leaders. The session was led by the one and only Katherine Lanpher. The session also included our new OEP staffers Courtney Baxter and Xueli.

Here are some highlights from today:

Katherine Lanpher, OEP Seminar Leader, explains why everyone's voice matters.

OEP Participants playing the game "That's Ridiculous"

An intense round of "That's Ridiculous" between OEP Participants

A group of shot of our new OEP Alums! Welcome to the team

Second group shot! For fun, everyone did their best impression of "That's Ridiculous"

I can not wait to read everyone’s op-eds!

Expertise and Experience: Two Ingredients to an Op-Ed with Bite

“What Do Young People Think of Kony 2012 Now?” This was the query of Carina Ray, a Public Voices Fellow at Fordham, whose op-ed on the waxing youth wariness of the Kony 2012 phenomenon went live on Time Ideas on April 20th. In it, she examines the unprecedented viral success of the film attacking Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army. She looks beyond the initial superlative popularity of the video, and into the evolving, critical reactions of the young people whose sympathy it was intended to evoke.

At first, Ray acknowledges, it inspired the sincere outrage of fresh-faced Americans whose estrangement from the conventional means of forcing change (money, for example) led them to express their support using the currency most available to them: tweets, likes, and status updates. Indeed, the support that the campaign amassed on social media sites was unprecedented.

But Ray, who polled her undergraduate students at Fordham, says that many of them soon became concerned by the troubling African stereotypes featured in the film, the manipulative nature of the narrative, and the reality that what the film was actually advocating was a military intervention in Africa.

Its success, she has come to believe from engaging in these dialogues, was more about a budding generation’s desire to affect some good in the world with the click of a button, rather than the actual particular merits of Kony 2012.

The sincerity of this impulse, she further concludes, is attested to by the fact that so many young people have withdrawn their support as criticisms of Kony 2012 came to light.

There are so many pieces out there that chew the same old cud about the phenomenon of social media at play in youth culture. Rarely is this paired with a conversation about youth empowerment. Ray hits on something profound in her analysis of the Kony 2012 flash in the pan– that kids today want to feel good about what they do in the world, and they’re highly amenable to using social media to accomplish it.

Also one of the most powerful parts of this op-ed was the fact that Carina explicitly derived her opinions from actual conversations that she had with actual young people. She recruited, not just her expertise as a scholar of African history, but also her first-hand experiences as an educator to make an article with immense authority and bite. Congrats Carina! Keep up the good work Public Voices Fellowship teams!

Standing in my Power

“Write to Change the World.” While no short order, on Saturday, April 21st, twenty-five women and one man gathered at ACLU San Francisco with the expressed intention of doing just that. Agreed, we may have had different visions of “change,” yet we spoke a similar language: “justice,” “social responsibility,” “equity” and “human rights” were among the words that we invoked.

This was the networking opportunity of the decade– had only the powerhouse of lawyers, community organizers, social scientists, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists known the power in our pockets. But, the daunting challenge of the day was finding our voice and “standing in our power.” Our facilitator, Courtney E. Martin, invited us to “do the white dude test:” Would a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, Protestant male even question his authority, whether legitimate or not?

With the encouragement of newfound friends, I tried on my expertise for the first time and not only stood in my power but bathed in it. Or, at least I added the “power spa” to my list of things to do before I die. The OpEd Project reinforced the notion that power, whatever it’s magnitude, can be used to realize a more equitable, just society in the same way that it can be used to decimate and destroy. Following the workshop, I practiced standing in my power. Bay Areans from San Francisco to Fremont now know that I’m the go-to person to reframe the “health disparities” debate from a person- centered, racialized one to a systems-and structures- oriented one.

What proved most powerful about the OpEd Project was not the compendium of tools for writing an OpEd or publishing widely. I suspect Courtney’s unspoken agenda was to make soldiers of us; to train us as “thought leaders” in a climate where treating one’s “ideological opponent” with empathy and respect is rare. In all honesty, that was exactly what I’d signed up for. Two days following the workshop, I’m well practiced at standing in my power, or at least trying it on for size. I had been hiding behind my institutions for the past decade, allowing powerful names like Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF to eclipse my light.

“Hello. My name is Ulluminair Salim. I am an expert in the social determinants of health. I am an expert because I have witnessed firsthand the detrimental effects of poverty on health and have served marginalized communities for over fifteen years. I have reinforced my personal experience and professional expertise with a Master of Public health and doctoral education in the sociology of health, illness, and medicine.” I stand in my power because millions of people around the world have protested and died so that I could wield the power my pen and “write to change the world.”

Ulluminair Salim (pictured below-right) produces diverse scholarship on the confluence of health and institutions, ranging from the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth to environmental racism/classism and disparate health outcomes.  She earned her Master of Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and is a doctoral student in sociology at UCSF.

One Op-Ed, Two Times the Expertise

On March 29th April Alliston and Susan Cecilia Greenfield, co-published an op-ed on CNN.Opinion entitled “‘Mommy Porn’ Novel Has Retro Message.” In it Alliston, who is a Public Voices Fellow at Princeton and Greenfield, who is in the program at Fordham, contemplate the plot devices and gendered power dynamics in the recent hit trilogy “Fifty Shades of Grey,” from their perspectives as some of the foremost scholars in the field of literature.

I, Ravenna Koenig, the Public Voices Fellowship’s Junior Fellow, posed them some questions about the inspiration for and experience of collaborating on the piece. Below they discuss the logistics, the difficulties, and the boons of writing with a partner.

How did you and April decide to do this piece together?

Susan Greenfield: April and I both study eighteenth-century literature, and we met many years ago at a seminar series for specialists in our field. Though I have not seen April in years, I always felt connected to her, and we recently became Facebook friends.  When I became Public Voices Fellow in the fall of 2011, I saw April’s name on the list of Princeton Fellows. During a Public Voices Fellowship conference call, I made a pitch for the insights a literature specialist could offer about a cultural phenomenon like Fifty Shades of Grey [a popular erotic fiction trilogy].  April then spoke up and seconded my point.  After we got off the phone, I Facebooked April and proposed that we write a joint op-ed about Fifty Shades of Grey.  She called me back, and we were off and running.

April Alliston: That’s a pretty thorough and accurate account–I don’t see how I can add to it except to say that I’m thrilled to be included in the Public Voices program and the opportunity for reconnecting with a scholar with whom I’ve always shared intellectual, political, and other affinities has been one of the best things about it!

The brevity that an op-ed necessitates is notoriously challenging. Did writing with a partner compound that challenge (perhaps by giving you twice the number of ideas to sort through), or lessen it?

SG: Working with April was a great pleasure and relief. I found it much easier to meet the standards of brevity together than alone. True, we generated more ideas than I would have on my own, but our discussions made it easier for me to see which ones were central and which ones could be cut.  Our frequent conversations sharpened our main points.  Though I spent more time preparing this op-ed than I spent on the earlier ones I wrote alone, I felt very confident about the content because we decided on it together.

AA: I would add that I found it very freeing to be able to brainstorm together and pool our ideas and drafts while knowing that I could rely on Susan’s sharp editorial eye to cut away the excess if I just allowed myself to get it all down on “paper.”  I hadn’t been able to get any piece into finished form since I joined the program, but Susan’s encouragement and enthusiasm helped me overcome the obstacles that had prevented me from finishing a piece on my own earlier.

Was there anything about the collaboration process that surprised you?

SG: I expected to enjoy the process of working with April, but I was still surprised by how much I enjoyed it and by how intellectually stimulating it was.  At the same time, there was a surprising amount of diplomacy involved.  When editing each other’s writing, April and I had to delicately balance our joint goals with our individual opinions and prose styles.  Finally, I was surprised that the process of writing a joint op-ed took even longer than the process of writing alone.

AA: I’m not sure I was actually “surprised” by any aspect of our collaboration.  I think it’s possible that I’ve collaborated on publications in the past more than Susan has–I’ve published academic articles in collaboration with more than one other scholar.  Of those, I did find Susan the easiest collaborator to work with, even though my earlier collaborators were people I knew better.  I guess that counts as a surprise–and perhaps the best surprise is that I feel because of this experience my long connection with Susan is blossoming into a friendship and I hope a continued collaborative relationship, all of which was completely unexpected when I entered the program.

What are the benefits of writing an article for broad public consumption with a partner? Are there any downsides?

SG: Because April and I spent so much time discussing the material, I felt especially confident about the article’s intellectual integrity. I said above that this op-ed took me longer to write than the earlier ones I wrote on my own.  But I should add, that the joint op-ed also covered much more textual ground than my solo pieces.  In combining our knowledge and dividing our tasks, April and I accomplished far more together than I could have by myself.

I also benefited from corresponding with April after our piece appeared.  When Maureen Dowd published an op-ed on Fifty Shades of Grey just a few days after ours and repeated some of our main points without mentioning our article (she probably didn’t read it), I was grateful that April seemed unfazed.  A few days after that, The Guardian criticized and essentially misunderstood our op-ed, and we discussed that too.  Instead of obsessing about the criticism, I turned to our partnership for reassurance and support.  For me, there was no downside.

AA: Perhaps the only downside I can think of is that working with someone else always requires more organization and communication, and involves less individual control over one’s time–and that can be a little difficult in the face of the fast pace of this kind of publication.  The best advantage in this case, I think, was that collaborating gave us both more courage to say things in public that we knew would be controversial, and to face the discouragements Susan mentions as well as quite a few very nasty comments posted on our article.

The OpEd Project, UTS and JTS

Group shot of all the great participants!

Yesterday was my first time co-leading a session and what a day it was. I helped Deborah with a day-long session at Union Theological Seminary that was half UTS students and half rabbinical and cantorial students from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Apparently, the two groups don’t often team up, despite being across the street from one another, and it was fascinating to hear how many concerns they share. For me, the most moving part was hearing participants question the value of their knowledge – and then move past those doubts.

Deborah Siegel, OEP Regional Manager

It was a great, packed day. Amazing how much you can squeeze in before sundown!

-Sharon Lerner

Writing to Change the World @ NorCal’s ACLU

This weekend an amazing group of women came together at the Northern California ACLU to perfect their expertise and opinion writing skills. The lovely and talented Courtney E. Martin taught the day-long seminar and Joe Loya- mentor-editor extraordinaire (and author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell)- stopped by for an inspiring visit. A big thank you to our incredible host and ally, Laura Saponara, and SF Alumni Ambassador, Gemma Bulos!

Mentor-Editor Rebecca Wallace-Segall Weighs in on Mentoring from the Upper West Side

Rebecca Wallace-Segall, an award-winning journalist, and founder of the incredible creative writing nonprofit for kids Writopialab.org, tells us why she is an OpEd Project Mentor-Editor.

Inspiring OEP Moments at Yale

Priya Natarajan, Yale professor of astronomy and physics, chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum, and a pilot member of The OpEd Project’s Public Voices Thought Leadership Project at Yale, gave Katie a tour of campus this past week.  Here Priya stands before the “Women’s Table” a sculpture designed by the acclaimed Maya Lin, which represents the number of women at Yale as a function of time.  Looking at the first couple of centuries, Priya notes that  ”there are a lot of zeroes.”  In 1873, the sculpture shows 13 women – the first women scholars at Yale. Undergraduate women were finally  admitted in 1969.

Make It Better Scholarship Spot for Chicago Core Seminar!

Make It Better is a print magazine, website and community resource for the Chicago north shore. To date, Make It Better has made over 49,000 lives better and helped raise over $1.4M for their not-for-profit partners.

 

In October 2012, publisher Susan Noyes and editor Laura Hine joined us at a happy hour following that month’s public seminar.  They’ve since offered to scholarship 1 slot at the next Chicago seminar, taking place on April 28. 

 

We’re committed, as ever, to making The OpEd Project programs affordable for any woman who is committed to changing the world with her voice.  If you know someone in the Chicago area who should attend our seminar but couldn’t otherwise be there, please pass news of this opportunity on!  Tell folks to get in touch directly with Deborah Siegel to apply.

 

(As per our regular policy, we ask anyone requesting a scholarship to “pay in words” by sending us  a request in writing telling us why the assistance is needed, what op-ed you are committed to writing, and how it will contribute to changing the world.  More about our scholarship policy here.)