The Women's Media Center Announces Second Class of
Progressive Women's Voices 2009
Second Year of Media Training Program Draws 265 Applicants To Date
April 14, 2009 (New York) - The Women's Media Center (WMC) is pleased to announce the second class of Progressive Women's Voices (PWV) for 2009. A core program of the WMC, Progressive Women's Voices is an intense media training and outreach program. Now in its second year, PWV is a resounding success, with participants diversifying the media landscape by achieving over 1500 media hits. This year, PWV women are being featured in high-profile outlets like ABC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Fast Company, Business Week, MSN, Yahoo as well as hundreds of other significant media outlets in print, online, radio, and broadcast.
"The Women's Media Center is so proud to have created this phenomenal program," said Carol Jenkins, WMC president. "Because the Progressive Women's Voices Program is known for its excellence and efficacy, we have received 265 applications this year for 21 spaces. The WMC is excited about future of PWV and its tremendous impact. We are making women visible and powerful in the media every day through the program. Together with our database, SheSource.org, our PWV graduates truly make the WMC the go-place for journalists looking for women sources, experts, and commentators."
One additional PWV class will be accepted in 2009. The application deadline for the final class of 2009 is June 1, with two-day trainings to be held at the end of July, August, and September in New York City. Previous applicants are welcome to reapply. For more information, visit our website.
Participants in the second class for 2009 include experts in ending global poverty, fighting wrongful conviction, breast cancer, feminism, media diversity and more. These ten women come from manifold backgrounds, reflecting a diversity often absent from mainstream media coverage. They join 44 participants from 2008 & 2009, forming a roster of progressive women adding their voices to the national conversation in areas of economics, politics, health care, immigration, women's rights, workplace policy, and other important issues. To learn more about previous classes of PWV, please go here.
Maria Cadenas is the executive director of the Cream City Foundation, an organization working for social change on behalf of gay and transgender communities in southeastern Wisconsin. Cadenas is the former Associate Director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin and a former consultant for Accenture. Cadenas sits on the board of Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues, a national affinity group working on behalf of gay and transgender philanthropy. She has served on the board of Community Shares of Greater Milwaukee and Lesbian Alliance. A graduate of Beloit College, Cadenas is currently pursuing her MBA from Alverno College and host a weekly radio show promoting women singers and musicians.
Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, performer, and activist, and the editor of the hit new book Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. Friedman is also an award-winning writer and performer whose work has been published in outlets including Bitch, AlterNet, and PW.org. She is Program Director of the Center for New Words, and is co-founder of WAM!, CNW's conference on Women, Action, & the Media. Friedman is a charter member of CounterQuo, a national leadership coalition challenging the way we respond to sexual violence.
Tamera Gugelmeyer is an international feminist activist, writer, and Executive Director of The Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI), where she works with expert women's human rights activists from around the world to leverage the pioneering organization's 25-year-old history and align it with the political and social justice activism opportunities of Web 2.0 and beyond. Gugelmeyer has been instrumental in revitalizing the fundraising, new media, and marketing and communications strategies of several national women's organizations and has focused on corporate marketing and communications at Cisco Systems, strategic fundraising at Southern Methodist University, and targeted marketing and communications campaigns at the Dallas Women's Foundation. Gugelmeyer serves on the boards of Feminist.com and Women and Hollywood, in addition to serving as an advisor to LoveYourBody.org. She is currently at work on a book about young women, sex and technology.
Emily May is the co-founder of HollabackNYC.com, a website dedicated to ending street harassment through social media. Now, HollbackNYC receives over 1000 hits per day and over 15 Hollabacks were established worldwide. In 2008, May co-founded New Yorkers for Safe Transit, a coalition dedicated to making public transportation safe for all New Yorkers. The Coalition was successful in getting anti-harassment ads up in the subway in fall of 2008. In addition, May works at Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, a youth workforce development agency serving low-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn where she develops creative solutions to poverty through programming and policy work. May also serves on the board of Girls for Gender Equity, an organization that teaches leadership and community organizing skills to low-income girls. May is a recipient of the Stonewall Women's Award and has an undergraduate degree from New York University and a Master's Degree from the London School of Economics.
Dori J. Maynard is the president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the oldest organization dedicated to helping the nation's media accurately and fairly portray all segments of our society. Maynard also heads the Fault Lines project, a diversity framework that helps people find common ground while celebrating their differences. Before joining the Institute in 1994, Maynard spent a decade working as a reporter at the Bakersfield Californian, The Patriot Ledger, in Quincy, Mass. and the Detroit Free Press. In 1993 she followed in her father's footsteps as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, specializing in research on public policy and poverty. Maynard is a Fellow of The Society of Professional Journalists, and in 2003, she was named one of the 10 Most Influential African Americans in the Bay Area and in 2008 she received the Asian American Journalists Association's Leadership in Diversity Award.
Nina Morrisonis an attorney specializing in criminal justice and human rights issues. Since 2002, she has been on staff at the Innocence Project in New York, representing prisoners from around the nation who are seeking post-conviction DNA testing to prove their innocence. During that time, she has represented over a dozen prisoners who have been exonerated by DNA evidence and freed from the nation's prisons or death rows and has worked on several United States Supreme Court cases involving criminal justice and constitutional issues. Prior to joining the Innocence Project, Nina was a civil rights attorney in private practice, handling a broad range of free speech, employment discrimination, and police misconduct cases. Nina is a graduate of New York University School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar, and Yale University.
Dara Richardson-Heron is the CEO of the Greater New York City Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, an organization which serves as the largest source of nonprofit funds in the world dedicated to the fight against breast cancer. Dr. Richardson-Heron has more than 17 years of health care leadership and management experience in the corporate and nonprofit sectors, serving as the Chief Medical Officer of United Cerebral Palsy of NYC and National Chief Medical Officer for United Cerebral Palsy Association. During her 11 year tenure at Consolidated Edison Company of NY, Inc. she served as the Special Assistant to the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Executive Medical Director and Director of Human Resources. The recipient of many awards, she has been honored with the YMCA Academy of Women Achievers Award, YMCA Black Achiever in Industry Award and was named one of the "25 Influential Black Women in Business" by The Network Journal. Dr. Richardson-Heron received a Doctorate in Medicine from New York University School of Medicine and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Biology from Barnard College of Columbia University.
Anita Sharma is the North American coordinator for the United Nations Millennium Campaign, where she supports achieving the Millennium Development Goals to end global poverty. Sharma was the executive director of ENOUGH, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities. She served as governance advisor in Indonesia with the Office of the UN Recovery Coordinator and has held international posts in Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait with the International Organization for Migration (IOM).Sharma directed the Conflict Prevention Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has also worked with the Role of American Military Power Project, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has a Bachelor's degree with honors from Syracuse University and a Master's from Columbia University.
Jessica Valenti is the founder and editor of the popular blog and online community, Feministing.com, and the author of three books: Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters, He's a Stud, She's a Slut�and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, and The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women. She is also a co-editor of the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. Valenti's writing has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian (UK), Ms. magazine, Salon.com and Bitch magazine. She received her Masters degree in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, where she is now a part-time lecturer. Valenti speaks at universities and organizations across the country on feminism, blogging, and politics.
Courtney Young is the Director of Development for Chica Luna Productions, promoting socially conscious media by, about and for people of color, as well as a blogger at thethirtymilewoman.wordpress.com. Previously, Young served as a research fellow at UCLA's Summer Humanities Institute. Young's fiction and pop culture criticism has been published in the Stanford University Black Arts Quarterly, 971 and the Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Literature. She is currently completing two books, the first an edited collection of essays about the ways in which colorism in pop culture and media effects the lives of Black and South East Asian women in the United States. The second book is a collection of essays about Black women and political citizenship and participation. Young received her Master's Degree from NYU and her Bachelor's Degree from Spelman College.
The Progressive Women's Voices participants join an outstanding roster of women sources and experts already signed on with the WMC to ensure that women are visible and powerful in the media. The Women's Media Center acts as a spokesperson resource for media professionals seeking to connect with great women sources in a variety of areas. For more information on the organization or to connect with any of these women, please visit our Progressive Women's Voices page or contact Tristin Aaron, Media Director, at (212) 563 0680, [email protected].
The Women's Media Center was founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem to make women more visible and powerful in the media. The WMC places female voices into the media, offers media training, and publishes original reports and commentaries as well as links to women columnists and bloggers, news organizations, and journalism sources on its Web site, www.womensmediacenter.com.
