 I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and when we were talking about this panel, I kept calling it Gen X, Gen Y, the next generation. And then somebody said it sounded like Star Trek episode, and I figured that wasn't half bad anyway. I was going to ask with a full audience how many people were here who were in their 20s and who were in their 30s and 40s and 50s and so on. And I was thinking about this morning some of the benefits and the deficits of chronological maturity. And I thought that one of the benefits to chronological maturity is being around long enough to have or at least feel that you have a sense of context for what is happening in the moment. And that one of the deficits of chronological maturity, which is to say when you have gotten as old as you've gotten, one of the deficits is having been around long enough to have or at least feel you have a sense of context. And I think that it is because of that deficit that we are in fact here today. And I will address that a little bit more in a few minutes. As a human being, welcome some people having a seat. As a human being on the spaceship Earth, I think it's a fair observation to note that what one sees in the context of a span of time in one's life probably is profoundly enormously and really outrageously, I think, changed every 50 years. So for each generation in between or 50 years hence, our context of which we understand our present time is incredibly, incredibly different. I recall my mother complaining, it's not the way it used to be. And I came of age in the 60s and as you can imagine, even having the most radical of parents, which I'm pleased I did actually, they were unhappy about the sloppiness of dress and that was before jeans. They were upset about the sloppiness of speech with the onset of cool man and so on. And of course, I find myself complaining as my son who is here today will attest to about like, like you know what I mean. And of course, there were sex drugs and rock and roll. And I think the older generation had a little bit of a hard time with that. I can attest to the fact that there was nothing to have a hard time about. But having lived in the 60s, we also lived during a very successful militant activism in civil rights, anti-nuclear marches, protests against the Vietnam War, and of course the Women's Revolution, which began in the 1970s. And it was a field day for change. But the means towards the end was on target at that time. The form and the rage and the problems were cohesive. The form worked, the rage was present, and the effects were evident. Telephones were connected by cords. Televisions were mostly black and white. And movies were only in the theater. And those were our technological advances that we enjoyed in our teens and in our 20s. It was another world, obviously, I think it was another lifetime. And in this moment and in this life, we're living at the crossroads. I really do believe we are at the crossroads of our emancipation yardstick. The power of our country's demographic is significantly altered over the last 50 years. The cultural landscape over the last 50 years has changed. And technological advancement, obviously, is beyond whatever our imaginations could possibly have dreamed of and probably is the most democratic part of this country at this time. One year ago, the Ms. Foundation, an executive director, Sarah Gould, who is with us here today, put together a meeting. I like to think of it as a think tank. There were about 12 of us and only one person at the table was under 40. And it was an exciting afternoon. It was thoughtful, it was of concern, but there were too many gripes from the gray hares of us that we were reinventing the wheel, that we discussed this. I don't think I was one of those voices, but I'm just reporting. That we discussed this years ago that no younger women are activists, no younger women are feminists, and so on and so forth. And our moderator today, Sharna Goldsaker, clearly and simply stated at one point when somebody had said something fairly outrageous, I think, that is not true, she said. And I think all of you here today are panelists are the exclamation point, at least for me they are, of the statement of that fact. Sharna responded to my invitation for a couple of lunches together, and they were informative and exciting, I think, for each of us. And we invited Sarah Gould to join the conversation, and then the three of us decided to grow exponentially, and we did. We have had seven meetings with no agenda. We're now, I like to think of this as the dirty dozen, or the women who lunch. We always go to my office and have lunch, and decided all of us who work very, very hard, we're now suddenly women who lunch. They've been wonderful meetings that have included me, Sharna, Sarah, Olivia Greer, who is with us here today, Amy Sanonman, who's with Grantswell Community Mural Project, it's founder and director, Monique Mehta of the Third Wave Foundation, Liz Absuk of the Absuk Consulting Services, and daughter of the great and wonderful Bella Absuk, Benita Milla Johnson, excuse me, who's Brooklyn Young Mothers Collective, Nicole Mason, National Council for Research on Women, Malia Lazu, the gathering project, Valawu, who's a law student, Laura Walker, who's president of WNYC and Carol Jenkins, also with us here today, who's the head of the Women's Media Center, and so it's a great and wonderful group. The majority of women in this group are under 35, and so for the four of us who are way over 35, it has been a tremendous opportunity to hear and understand and begin to be educated about what's going on. We have discussed issues and problems, of course, but we have also discussed vocabulary and language. We've discussed categories and passions and different foci. And I think one of the things I've come away from, and perhaps we'll hear a little bit about that today, I don't know, is that the vocabulary may be different. The same way that we have a cell phone instead of a corded phone, and the same way that we have instantaneous email instead of a black and white television, we may have a different vocabulary for what may be the same passion and thrust for equality and justice, and to try and find a way to better our social landscape. So as a group, us dirty dozen women who lunch reached a consensus to try and transcend these divides, these generational divides, and to move into some kind of solidarity. And we haven't really come up yet with a mission statement, which we're going to be working on, and we haven't come up with a program, but we decided before too much time went by that we really wanted to begin. And so today is the beginning of what we don't know, and it may seem like a spit in the bucket, but we're all very determined to hear from all of you a panel which Sharon has put together to hear about your activism, your passions, your work, the vocabularies, your commitments. And I made a little note here, which I guess I just have to read. I am compelled that a woman may not be running for president this year, but the door must be kept wide open. The backlash I think we have seen or seeing is already begun, and we need to hold our place and continue our work, and we need to do that in solidarity as women of all generations. And I hope that all of the things that we all do continue to move us towards the places that we want to be. So with that, my pleasure is to introduce you to our moderator, Sharna Goldsecker, who is vice president of the Andrew and Charles Bromfman Philanthropies, where she directs 2164 division specializing in next generation and multi-generational strategic philanthropy. In that capacity, Sharna manages Grand Street, a network for 18 to 28 year olds who will be involved in their family's philanthropy or who are already involved. She develops philanthropic tools, including Slingshot, a resource guide to Jewish innovation, which is online, all of this is online, everything's online, the world is wild and wonderful, and speaks and consults on multi-generational philanthropy with families, foundations, federations, and families. She's a graduate from University of Pennsylvania with a major in urban studies and religious studies and a master's in public administration from New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. She has additional training in organizational development and group dynamics. She has put together an extremely wonderful panel for us today. I am delighted. Please, Sharna, introduce them and welcome. And I thank you very much for having put this together. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. You're welcome. Really warm thanks to Elizabeth, both for the inspiring introduction, but for inviting us to have this conversation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and for the intellectual space you've created at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. An additional thanks to Sarah Gould, our co-sponsor from the Ms. Foundation for Women and to all of you who are here today. I know it's a beautiful sunny day outside, so if you're here, it means you want to be here for this conversation and we're delighted to have it with you. If you're watching this on video and joining us for the conversation at another time, we'll try to cleat the noise down from the crowds up in the balcony and invite you to engage in it with people in your own living room in a later time. I just want to underscore three things that Elizabeth said that are the motivations for me in this panel. I'd like to sort of state upfront the underlying premise in how I organize a panel. So for one, as Elizabeth said, it's an opportunity to hear the voices of next generation women, Gen X and Gen Y, and to know loud and clearly that we are here and involved as women activists leading in our communities. Secondly, women leaders aren't necessarily just at women's organizations anymore, but as you'll see from our panelists are involved in a wide variety of social and economic justice issues. And then thirdly, there are four generations of the invitation states, Gen Y, Gen X, baby boomers and traditionalists who are all working in the same communal space right now. And really each was informed by different historic, social, economic circumstances that created sort of a generational personality for each. And so how do we come to understand the generational personalities of each of those four generations? Gen X and Gen Y up here today and hopefully you'll add your voices to the conversation for those of you who are in the room. But really to learn from each other how we can work on issues together because we know that the issues are larger than each of our generational cohorts. So hopefully the third outcome will be learning some strategies for how we can bridge those generational divides. The way this is going to work is I'll introduce our panelists, invite them to say some opening remarks. I'll add a series of questions to sort of dig deeper into the issues and then invite you to add your questions and comments and we'll have a roving microphone. So don't hesitate to jot things down as we're speaking and we'll invite you to join the conversation shortly. So over here is Ai-jen Poo who is the lead organizer with Domestic Workers United, an organization of Caribbean, Latina and African Nannies, housekeepers and elderly caregivers in New York, organizing for power, respect and fair labor standards. She's also the associate director of CAV, organizing Asian communities and has been organizing with immigrant women workers since 1996. To her right we have Olivia Greer, an associate producer at the Culture Project a New York theater company producing work with contemporary political issues. Her capacity there is artistic director, women's center stage, an annual festival celebrating women artists whose work give voice to human struggles globally. And most recently Olivia founded Emancipate, an initiative bringing together women musicians and activists amplifying social justice issues through their musical collaborations. Over here we have Malia Lizzou, the director of the Gathering Project for Justice an intergenerational and intercultural space to allow the justice community in the broadest sense, mostly younger activists to get to know one another, find a common agenda and have tools to further their work and prevent incarceration. Leah was previously the director of the Racial Justice Campaign Fund, a progressive majority as well as the National Field Director for Cities for Progress. And lastly to my left we have Kyung Ri or KJ if that's okay to call you that on the panel is the director of the Prison Moratorium Project focusing on juvenile justice. Its mission is to affect juvenile justice system reform, reduce incarceration rates for people of color and we'll hear hopefully more from all of you momentarily. Really I would love to, I know these bios sort of capture our titles but invite you all to take that one step further and tell us how you see the work and also if you could add what motivates you, how did you come to the work that you do today? Maybe Ai-jen we'll start with you. Sure, thank you so much Sharna, it's great to be here with all of you. Hi everyone, it's a beautiful day and there's no where I'd rather be, I just want to say that. And thanks to the Brooklyn Museum and the co-sponsors of this really great dialogue. So I am an organizer with Domestic Workers United as Sharna said and we are an organization of 2,000 nannies, housekeepers and elderly caregivers. And we live in a city here in New York where over 200,000 women every day and get up three hours before most of us other folks do and go to work in other people's homes to make it possible for those people to then go to work and do what they do. And that work plays a really important role in this economy here in New York but we rarely think about it and we rarely account for it. And in fact the laws that exist don't even recognize this workforce as a real workforce. So labor laws actually exclude domestic workers, almost every single labor law actually excludes domestic workers with the exception of minimum wage laws. So the National Labor Relations Act that gives workers the right to collectively bargain and form a union excludes domestic workers. The Occupational Safety and Health Laws exclude domestic workers. Civil rights, anti-discrimination laws and human rights laws don't apply to domestic workers. So you have a situation where there's an enormous workforce of women who are doing critical work and most of whom are primary income earners for their families. 51% are primary income earners for their families. And they're completely vulnerable to abuse. So if they happen to find a good employer then they're actually, there's a good chance that they might get a few days off or the opportunity to go to their own children's PTA meeting. But the vast majority of people actually don't have that situation or are vulnerable to different kinds of abuses because a lot of employers of domestic workers don't actually think of themselves as employers and they might even think of themselves as employees themselves and aren't aware that there's actually a set of guidelines and obligations that you have as an employer. So what you have is a situation where women are working 13, 14-hour days, some are living in their employer's homes with no job security, no healthcare, often for below minimum wage, no time off to see the doctor, a lot of people who call in sick risk losing their jobs for actually calling in sick. So it's a choice between actually going to work or having a job and going to take care of your own health, which is particularly challenging when you're taking care of kids and kids actually often carry a lot of sicknesses and so they often get sick from the kids that they take care of but they can't take care of their own health. There's a systemic problem in this industry where you've got an enormous workforce of women who are not protected, who are not recognized, and whose work is being undervalued. And so what we do at Domestic Workers United is through organizing and bringing people together in an organization, establishing courses and training programs for people to develop, to understand their rights and exercise their rights and develop their leadership and their ability to organize other domestic workers and through actually organizing campaigns that change the conditions that workers deal with every day. For example, right now we're working on a campaign for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York, which would establish labor protections for domestic workers for the first time in this country, in any state, including healthcare, sick days, notice and severance pay, protection from discrimination, basic rights for workers that otherwise could never be negotiated by a worker on her own. We're trying to enact a law that would actually put these protections into place in the laws. So that's what we're working on right now and through the organizing and bringing people together we've been successful in winning over half a million dollars in unpaid wages for domestic workers who've been underpaid by their employers. We've graduated over 450 nannies from our NANI training program who are now trained in infant child CPR as well as know how to negotiate for their rights and make sure that they're being respected and treated with dignity. And we're continuing to work to build this movement in this workforce all over the country. We're working together with other organizations that are organizing domestic workers and we've actually formed a National Alliance of Domestic Workers and we're going to be meeting here in New York next week. So it's actually a really exciting time for this work that's happening and we've got a growing workforce of feminists that we're actually developing people who are bringing dignity and value to the work that has been traditionally associated with women's work, work that women do to actually care for and raise every generation. Bringing dignity and recognition to that work is something that touches everybody and I think that that's much of the inspiration for me personally for why I'm involved in this work and what drives me is that when we have a world where all work is recognized and respected it's going to be a world that looks very different from the world that we have today and I think it's going to be a world that also has taken on and addressed some of the root causes of why there's inequality and injustice today. And the work that women do in the home has never been recognized or protected whether it was the work of my mother or my grandmother or the work that domestic workers do in the home. And so that work bringing respect and recognition to that work was something that I always thought about growing up and I think that talking to my mother it really inspired me to want to continue to do this work and also see the way that it's connected to domestic violence in the home and other forms of injustice that we see and I'm going to stop there and maybe pick it up in the question and answer but just... Thank you. Olivia maybe we can turn it over to you. My microphone. Hi. So my name is Olivia Greer. I'm an associate producer at Culture Project which is a theater company in Soho that presents work that's focused on issues of social justice and I came to that work through sort of a trajectory of being an artist myself and also being really interested in how the arts play a role in social justice activism. So my work at Culture Project is primarily directing a festival called Women's Center Stage which works to bring together women artists who are engaged in questions of social justice through their work. And I come to that for two specific reasons I think. The first is the awareness that women continue to be underrepresented in all industries so I think in theater right now the numbers are something like of the plays that get produced in America every year 22% are by women and the numbers are even less for directors and designers and stage managers. So we're talking about an arena which in some ways is not seen as an area for social justice but still faces the same kind of inequality that anything does, that banking does, that any industry that we might find does. So that's one piece of it. And then the second piece is that in every movement for change I think that we can remember that has basically existed throughout human history women have been major, major leaders of that change and often in unrecognized ways and so for us the work at Women's Center Stage is about both drawing attention to the issues through the art and also locating women as agents of change in that work. So we try and bring together these women artists and activists to talk about the work that they do and to think together about how to advance that work. And I found it emancipates which is sort of another step beyond what we do at Women's Center Stage with the question of how the arts can actually create tangible change. So often times we see a play, we go and see some music that is about a social justice issue and we learn about that issue but how do artists actually get involved in the work of change and so emancipate is bringing together women artists to actually go into communities and find ways of supporting the work that's already happening. So we began this year in New Orleans bringing a coalition of six women artists from around the country to New Orleans to spend time together meeting with community organizers and think about how they could make a difference in that city. And what happened was that they were all inspired to create new work. They all wrote new songs and this fall we'll be going back to New Orleans and produce a CD, all the proceeds of which will go to community organizations in New Orleans. So there's this sort of new model that we're trying to advance which is about finding ways to use artistic work to create really tangible means of change. So I can say more about that later but I guess on the personal side for me this is all about sort of having a sense of myself both as an artist and as an actor in the world and looking to find ways of bringing those two things together and looking for the ways in which our culture, our art is very much engaged in the issues that we face so that it's not something that we go to to escape it's really something that we go to to find ways of digging in and understanding better and engaging one another. Thank you. So Melia, I would love to hear more about your work and what motivates you to do it. Absolutely. First of all I just want to say that I'm really thankful that we're having this discussion. I think that we're in... that our society needs to go through a paradigm shift and if we don't have honest dialogue about what that looks like and what that means we're not going to be the ones that are going to be forming the next the next shift that we're going into and I think that's going to be detrimental to the progressive movement and radical thought as a whole. So conversations like this are really really important for us to get into. The organization that I work for currently is called the Gathering for Justice and it was an organization that really emerged out of a couple years of going throughout the country and meeting with young people and with civil rights activists of all sorts. The organization's vision came from a gentleman by the name of Harry Belafonte who is a singer, actor, activist and came home from South Africa and saw the image of a five-year-old girl being arrested in school. She was being thrown over her desk. The cops were putting... there were four police officers, they were putting handcuffs on her. When the handcuffs didn't fit, they got the twist ties because she was at 60 pounds, she was so dangerous and they handcuffed her, shackled her, put her into the car, brought her down to the police station and sent her to charge her and then came to find out that what she was being charged with, being unruly in the school is actually not against the law. And so this poor child was put through all of that trauma to just be released and Mr. Belafonte called me and said, I just saw this, find out more information, find out where the protest is, find out where the rally is, find out where the movement is behind protecting this child and let them know that I will be there. I called St. Petersburg to find out that there was no protest, there was no rally, there was no movement to protect this child and as a matter of fact, she was one of 15,000 under the age of nine of children who are being put through this system and as we started doing more research, what we came to find is that it's not that there's no one out there doing this work. There are amazing organizations out there that are ringing the alarm for us to realize what is going on with our children and what Mr. Belafonte saw was that the criminal justice system, the juvenile justice system is our modern-day Jim Crow and that it is essential that we use radical thinking, radical organizing but more importantly that we apply nonviolent direct action to raise the level of civic tension and to support the groups on the ground that are doing this work. He called together a gathering of the elders. I like to say it was everyone who was in a Taylor Branch book who's still alive came and they talked about how to reclaim their children and what became very evident, very similar to our opening remarks here today, was that we were talking past one another and that the mistrust, the feeling of abandonment that a lot of our young people felt was something that we needed to work through and so that's the work that we do. We create this space, we allow for emergence, we're a decentralized structure, we're a true movement. We like to say that we're a fractal. Oftentimes people are like, oh well don't we all have to have the same thing and be doing the same thing at the same time and da-da-da. And when you really start, especially when you start talking to the elders, whatever area they were organizing was the centerpiece of the Civil Rights Movement and you realize that everything was the centerpiece of the Civil Rights Movement. What was going on in Mississippi was the centerpiece of the Civil Rights Movement. What was going on in Selma was a piece of the Civil Rights Movement. What was going on in Chicago was a piece of the Civil Rights Movement and when you took a step back, that's when you begin to see the shift and the wave. And so we allow our young people to create their own agendas and we give them the support in being able to see those agendas through. We also do a lot of model exchange. So KJ, who's going to be telling you about the amazing work that she does, wherever we go we're talking about prison moratorium project, they're doing some of the most advanced work in the country, in this area. And so when we travel around, we take KJ, we take Chino and make sure that our young people hear from these models that are working so that they can also learn how to apply them. I want to end my comments by really addressing this idea of activism in the 21st century. And I want to end by where I began, which was talking about this paradigm shift. As we know, in a couple of decades this country is going to be a majority-minority country and that's really important for us to recognize. It's important for us to recognize because of the cultural changes. But we also need to recognize what technology has done to this country and how it's imperative that we start deconstructing our normal demographic checkboxes. So the idea of hip-hop black people, white people like this, the hottest skateboarder out right now is a black kid from Compton. And what technology has allowed us to do is it's allowed us to build a culture that is no longer based on where I am demographically because I can access so much on the web. And I think that that's something that we want to remember when we're reaching out to young people and when we're looking at doing organizing in the 21st century is that we can no longer do it traditionally. We can no longer think that certain stereotypes are fitting. We have to understand that young people are coming together and networks building friendships that to them are very real with people halfway across the world with whom they've never met in person. And it's those types of shifts that we need to really get in front of and stand on the edge and on the edge of movement and look out to see how we get in front of the eight ball on this one. Thank you. Thank you. K.J. A little bit about your work and what motivates you to do it. Hello everybody. Is this working? So I too want to, I mean it's an honor to be part of this panel and to be part of this space, especially in light of Elizabeth's introduction. I feel like we're very much, you know, we're part of kind of an emerging and emerging initiative that also is like vision being born and being implemented and that's always exciting to be kind of at the beginning stages of things. I'm going to start out, so I'm with an organization called the Prison Moratorium Project. It's a mouthful and I'll just put it out there. Our street name is No More Prisons and I'll get into, you know, what do you mean by No More Prisons? I don't have any questions that follow No More Prisons whenever I give out our website address. So let me start out with a little bit of history. Prison Moratorium Project started really as a vision and an idea inside the prison system, specifically inside the Greenhaven Correctional Facility, which is a maximum prison in upstate New York back in the 80s where following where a group called Greenhaven Think Tank formed inside Greenhaven Correctional Facility. This followed as a result of or as inspired by, I don't know, I don't know if some of you know, I'm just going to briefly mention in the 70s there was a major rebellion and organizing that happened inside the Attica prison where a lot of death, violence and conflict took place and a lot of debates around that. But the main point that I want to convey there is it really changed, I think, the landscape and kind of when Malia talked about paradigm shift, thinking about the prison system and the prison issues changed a lot in light of and following the Attica rebellion, the coverage and whatnot. You had prisoners who organized to fight for basic dignity and basic rights and basic conditions of human likelihood inside the prison system. And you could imagine being on lockdown, the kind of different circumstances and conditions under which they kind of came about and did that. But following that, there were basic rights, one, you're talking about toilet paper, you're talking about decent food, you're talking about healthcare, you're talking about library, law library and different basic rights. Following that event, a lot of different groups formed in different facilities and a lot of folks from Attica prison were dispersed and some of them came to Greenhaven Correctional Facility and formed this think tank where really the primary focus was there's a lot of resources and wisdom to be shared here and let's help each other with the learned experiences that we have and that at the end of the day, we need to be able to advocate for ourselves rather than depending on however best intention different advocates or whatnot in terms of how do you present your case in front of the parole board or how do you access resources outside for when you get out, all this stuff. In the course of that dialogue coming out of some basic kind of resource sharing, they started recognizing amongst themselves that vast majority of the prisons are upstate by the way, that vast majority of the prisoners inside the prison system and inside this prison and people move around a lot, prisoners are shipped from, you know, prisoners are moved from one facility to another as they started to notice a pattern that really vast majority of them came from 7 to 10 neighborhoods in New York City. So then that actually gave rise to a seminal study that they did in cooperation with different researchers that what 20 years after now is still cited and has given impetus and rise to other studies also in the juvenile justice realm which I'll get into later. So that's how it was born in terms of what is going on here in our communities that we're looking at 7 to 10 neighborhoods. How is this happening? Following the dialogue, they basically started to form, they started to initiate a series of legislative hearings inside the prison system calling for a prison moratorium. The vision and call-out was pretty stark and simple in the beginning. Let's call for a moratorium for 5 years on prison construction because you've got to understand at this point in the 80's I can give you some numbers right now in 2008 what it looks like in terms of the prison system in the US and also in terms of the world standing but these trends and these findings were already present and prominent in the 80's. When they started putting together the legislative hearings just calling for a 5 year moratorium on prison construction and what if we just rerouted those funds right? What if we could just envision rerouting those funds that would go to prison construction which was mammoth amount of money to the communities where most of the prisoners come from and that was their way of calling attention to the issues that exist in the communities with highest rates of incarceration. They actually called the legislators inside the prison system every year. It was a yearly legislative forum. That's how it began in terms of calling attention to and really kind of putting the paradigm shift in terms of how to think about prison issues because today you're really only thinking about in terms of prison conditions, prisoners rights that was kind of the best case scenario and really thinking about really taking the issue to how is this a social justice issue and even among the left activists you've got to understand prison issue was the pariah issue, right? Why don't you work on something more positive, right? Like education rights, reproductive rights, welfare reform while you're working on prison issues those are criminals so to speak. So one of the biggest challenges in the beginning was even amongst the left even amongst kind of the liberal progressives how to really reimagine and understand prison issues as a social justice issue. So following that founding one of the members of Greenhaven Think Tank who was critical in writing that study that I told you about in terms of 7 to 10 neighborhoods his name is Eddie Ellis and when he got out of the prison system he formed alliances with different allies outside and came to form what is now known as the prison moratorium project and over the years kind of fast forward to now it's gone through a lot of different phases in 1995 it formed officially as a volunteer organization we started getting funding from foundations in 2000 pretty much and in 2008 would kind of come full circle Eddie Ellis who was the founder back in the 80s who you know from the vision born brought it outside and helped to kind of form this organization he's now at McRever's college head of a center called Center for New Leadership on Urban Solutions we have in the last 10 years kind of moved the organization from the mission of stopping prison expansion and construction and looking at the larger issues to we have really been focusing on juvenile justice issues in the last seven to eight years by virtue of the kind of young activists that came into the organization and now we're going back to we've formed partnership with Eddie Ellis and we're going to be now located at McRever's college in partnership with Eddie Ellis so there's going to be an intergenerational as well as an institutional kind of marriage between the two but having said that I kind of went on about the history but the organizational strategy obviously whenever we talk about this everyone asks how do you do that, how do you do normal prisons how do you stop prison expansion the prison system which is so gigantic and just on that note in terms of the scope and scale of the prison system I imagine most of you know this but I'll just put out some just quick stats United States of America has the fastest and highest rate of incarceration in the world so what that lands us at a prison population of two million people behind bars right now and it's projected to go up in the next five to ten years now two million people locked up behind bars that's not taking into account 4.6 additional million people who are under the supervision of probation or parole so you're talking about about seven million people under this supervision of the criminal justice system so now when you look at the kind of wise there's a lot of wise that we could go into one thing that I would put out there statistically studies upon studies have come out with this is it's really not the first thing you're going to say most people say is it's the crime rates right well we must be building more prisons because there's an increasing crime rate in fact what's been driving the prison population and prison expansion is the policies rather than actually the crime rate crime rate actually has been going down in the last ten years now depending on what kind of crime index you look at you're going to find variation but overall crime rate has been going down what has been driving the population is longer sentencing laws and everything from quality of life crimes being enforced as well as harsher sentencing overall so that's really the policy and the practice is what's really been driving the system having said that when we say no more prisons and in terms of our organization our strategy falls into three areas no more prisons as in stopping the prison system from expanding and we are talking about the prison system the prison cells what not so an example of that that's one line in which we work so what we see as that strategy is what we call system reduction and system accountability so an example of that in New York City about six years ago under seven years ago or eight years ago under Giuliani's administration there was sixty four point six million dollars allotted in the capital budget of the city to expand two juvenile detention facilities in this city there's three so two out of three by sixty five million dollars just to give you a little bit of funding priority that breaks down to sixty five million dollars for two hundred jail cells expansion that breaks down to three hundred twenty thousand dollars per jail cell just for construction cost that doesn't include the two hundred over two hundred thousand dollars a year that department of juvenile justice spends just an operation cost back then it was hundred thirty thousand now it's two hundred thousand dollars how many kids can you send to Harvard on two hundred thousand dollars a year so when you start thinking about that scale when we found out about the sixty five million dollars in the budget for two hundred jail cell expansion hundred jails in the Bronx hundred jails cells in Brooklyn all the capacities at that time were under capacity they weren't even full so when we challenged the department of juvenile justice and had to do all this research in terms of how they're going to justify this their first line of defense was it's based on population projection so when you're at seventy percent capacity rather than looking at how can we keep this and lower it they are actually in the business of projecting population swell okay in terms of certain times of the year obviously not a very solid basis and we were able to beat them after a year of organizing under the rubric of justice for youth coalition and no more youth cells campaign we basically sat their budget and pulled the money out of their capital budget with a lot of organizing that was done by actually formerly incarcerated youth who were intensely trained so that's one way in which we fight the system going into the policies and bringing accountability to system expansion that we're so we've been so conditioned to just accept and it's become normalized on another level when we said no more prisons we're talking about the prison conditions that exist in communities and also amongst us kind of the prison mentality that our society has developed over the last thirty years of this mammoth system expansion so then on a community level we are working in fifteen communities with the highest rates of juvenile incarceration rate and then the third level which we kind of drawn no more prisons strategy is on a personal level it's the call out for no more prisons for you and me for a lot of young people directly affected by the prison system for a lot of young people coming from the neighborhoods how do you bring the kind of personal accountability how do you bring that sense of how do you start addressing what we call three eyes of oppression institutional and interpersonal and internalized oppression which is what we break down through our curriculum what that is so that's kind of our overall organizational strategy and we can get into specifics of that of that later and as question and answer comes and right now we're in the process of interesting story we're in the process of going into the three juvenile detention facilities and we actually have a contract with Department of Juvenile Justice which is interesting because we very much fought them hard six years ago and they brought us in and I can tell you many stories about that right now how that's dynamic is playing out but how I came to this work personally is a lot as all of us have a lot of encounters but I would say I would mention two main things my cousin was locked up my cousin who I didn't know I had until I was 16 years old was locked up and was involved in a gang was a gang leader and just in terms of how that was processed within my family and how it was and stigmatized both on a societal level and internally in our family that also brought me primarily to this work and going forward as I also studied philosophy and ethics and it also fell in line with other larger values. Thank you so you've all laid out a lot of inequality and justice that you're working on through different vehicles Malia I wanted to start some questions with you you mentioned paradigm shift and what I always like to remember about paradigm shift is as we're moving forward into a new paradigm we've come from somewhere and there's actually the turmoil between the two paradigms that we need to go through so how do you anchor yourself in the past paradigm like what are the social movements who are the elders what are the lessons learned that you draw on as we're going through this period of change definitely you know I think that when we when we talk about how are we anchored and in the gathering for justice we use a term called elder and it actually comes from the Lakota tribe and the indigenous peoples when we traveled around the country we went to Epps, Alabama to work with the rural rural southern blacks we went to Santa Cruz to work with Badi Oshumitos and get to know the Latino history and their current movements we went to Appalachia to work with the working class whites we went to Onondaga Indian Nation and then we went to LA County to work with the Asian Pacific Islander group and when we were in Onondaga we learned something really really important which was this term elder and the term elder can only is not applied to every person of old age and the term elder actually means listener and that's how they deem elders and we all kind of started to laugh because we were like our elders don't shut up we need to get them on this and what we realized was that that was a cultural shift and we really try to anchor ourselves in first and foremost recognizing and honoring our elders and we do it at every circle at every gathering we do but then we also recognize that space of allowance for paradigm shifts it's helpful when you can bring folks from different cultures who understand generations in a different way than we made in America and so what I do personally is I'm actually a big fan of history and so I read a lot and try to find roads that have been taken so I'm not reinventing the wheel and organizationally as I said we try to put young people with our elders as much as possible so that they can start seeing each other's humanity and they can start building off of each other's humanity and a quick story and then I'll shut up is when we were at the African American Democratic National Committee meeting in Detroit in Detroit, Michigan a couple years back and it was this intergenerational panel and it was Al Sharpton it was Reverend Jesse Jackson it was Reverend Steele and it was a couple other elders I think John Conyers and then it was a group of young people myself, Reverend Tune, Tracy Sturdiv and just some of the most amazing organizers in electoral politics and Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson you can imagine the only person that was missing was Fidel and I'd still be there listening to speeches and so of course they went on over and then when they were done they got up and they started leaving the young people and started leaving and it was this sort of like this moment of all of us in the young people just being so insulted and not even so much that we had to sit there for three hours to listen to the amazing knowledge that our elders have but that they weren't willing to give us the final 45 minutes of the day to hear us and I think that's something that we want to remember and when we're looking at this paradigm shift and how we're going to anchor it is that we do need to learn the lessons from our elders and they need to be taught we don't just need to be spoken at and I think that's something that's really, really important and with the shifts in technology I mean it's very similar to the radio or the telephone I mean we have a new mode of transportation and what we need our elders to do what it is that we're trying to do and to apply their knowledge and their experience of changing the world to these new tools that we have awesome so Olivia if you want to pick up I think about the anthropologist Margaret Mead talks about have to understand the cultures of the past and also the people of the present that are peers who are around us before we can start planning for the future do you want to talk about some of you there the people in the past, women or men that have inspired you or your peers who are informing your work yeah so this is maybe coming around things from the side but I think you know I didn't I'm 27 so I don't think I knew I was a feminist until maybe 2000 and I think and largely because I think my first feminist teacher was my dad so like I grew up in this family where the idea that women were equal to men was just went without saying I mean it was sort of assumed and there were there seems to me to be larger social justice issues to be addressed because in my very limited bubble of a world that was not an issue it simply wasn't and so I think it took me some time to identify questions of feminism and questions of gender equality and that came through meeting organizers who were working on other issues that who came to it from a lens that included feminism so reading Angela Davis women racing class was this aha moment of you know wow there's this whole agenda about civil rights and human rights and equality that includes women and is not only about women because if we're fighting for justice for everyone we're fighting for justice for everyone right now you know so that's by way of saying I think that for me the big awakening was was that I was very privileged you know as a young white woman growing up in New York I didn't have to worry about feminism and so it took me some real time to find the history of that and sort of understand the roots of the feminist movement and also why younger women of my generation don't necessarily identify with the word with the movement and so that's been a really interesting and challenging journey for me particularly since my work is very focused on women who are activists and artists so I would I would say Angela Davis in a big way as someone who really sort of helped craft that understanding for me there are two other pieces which I was going to mention one is that there was a sort of a cute anecdote when I was 16 was part of Union Summer which none of you are allowed to actually tell because I was too young to really be a part of Union Summer I was tagging along with my big brother and so we're in South Carolina organizing hotel workers on Hilton Head Island who were mostly African American women being bussed in to these plantations to do the laundry and to clean these hotels and most of the kids who are part of Union Summer were college students and I was like a sophomore in high school and I thought they were awesome and stayed up late debating theory of movements and things like that and there was this one guy who I don't remember his name he was just the quintessential macho organizer like had no interest in women felt like they should really stay at home had just was very very dismissive and it was late one night and he was saying some stupid things and the younger women were getting more and more upset and my brother who was this labor organizer a hero of mine sat him down and basically explained to him in the kindest way possible that if he was going to be an organizer and if he was going to work on behalf of justice for these hotel workers he couldn't leave the women out and it was a moment for him and it was a moment for me and so I think from that moment on I've really carried with me the notion that feminism is integral to any activism that we encounter just as I would think that anti-racism work is integral to any activism that we would encounter and the right for a woman to choose what she does with her body is integral to any kind of activism that we would encounter so I think I draw from from all of those movement leaders who teach us that and then the last thing is is just to sort of name some people I think Eve Ensler is someone I look to a lot in my work for melding the art and the activism piece and for sort of having this global scope and understanding about what women struggle with in the context that they live in so it's not just that they are the victims of sexism but that they live in the Congo and that they have no clean water and their children can't go to school and their husband's lives are in danger and so that there's when we talk about anti-sexism work and when we talk about feminism there's a whole context there that exists moment to moment and that's something that I take with me in my work a lot as well Thank you K.J. I know we've talked about some of the aspects that Olivia raised around identity and whether you define yourself as a feminist or a woman activist primarily or there are other lenses, other multiple identities that inform who you are if you could say a word about how your identity comes together into your work Sure I think going off of what Olivia was saying in terms of our identities in paraphrasing as I'm taking it to me at different moments in my life I've had a lot of different identities and I think our declaration of identity or identification with certain identities or groups I think is symptomatic of and it's telling of the context as for example like my coworker who identifies as a queer woman of color for the generic term in different spaces differently said at one point I didn't know it was a thing to be gay now in growing up actually growing up in the hood and growing up as a woman of color in terms of how she kind of identified and coming into activist circles when there were so many different identity terms and for me indifferent as as an immigrant I came to this country when I was 10 and also after having gone from here to Utah we had immigrated to New York and then we immigrated we moved to Utah and I had a whole different where I majored in philosophy and where I was maybe one of two women at that time in my class to be majoring in philosophy at University of Chicago which really tends to be traditional conservative institution and being surrounded by men who really didn't acknowledge women's presence at all especially in terms of philosophy and then just as a feminist philosophy course was being offered all the intersection of those things during those years my prominent that's when and that's not to say identifying myself as feminist very much so during that time that didn't necessarily override the other stuff I had to constantly integrate all these identities that were part of me and it was always a time of conflict in many ways always a time of struggle but I think at the end of the day moving forward especially getting out of college I had to really collect kind of all the mentors and different people in my life who really gave me language to what I was experiencing and to be honest in terms of my experiences there are two primary mentors who I always say gave me the ability to critically reflect on think about and articulate what I was experiencing and both of those people were I say were and are were because one of them passed away are African American African American male African American female and that kind of my social consciousness that's who really kind of raised me in my formation so my identities varied throughout my years and then I think as coming to this work it's kind of brought everything to the fore so one of the reasons why I'm interested in the identity piece is we're talking about generational issues is for a couple of reasons right the generation why is the most diverse generation of the four in American society today as Malia said the minorities will become the majority in the not too distant future there's a filmmaker named Lacey Schwartz who talks about when she was applying to college and it said to check her box of ethnicity she wanted to check the box that's outside the box because of her multiple identities of being African American and Jewish and trying to figure out which box she fit in left her sort of outside of those boxes so I think also for the opportunities I work mostly in the I started my work mostly in the Jewish community with Andrew and Charles Bromfman Philanthropies six years ago and realized that in the Jewish community the baby boomers and the traditionalists understood that being Jewish was their primary identity it defined the neighborhoods they could live in and how they voted who their friends were so as they were coming up that was the primary identity where for Gen Xers and Gen Yers we have much more unfettered access as Jews to American society and can choose more openly where we get to go to college or the clubs we get to join or who we get to marry and so the multiple identities I think for Gen X and Gen Y how you integrate them into yourself and into your work much more informs who we are as activists and is a theme that I just want to sort of underscore for today would be interesting to hear in the Q&A from other people in the room especially baby boomers and traditionalists if this transition to multiple identities comes into play for you if you define yourself as primarily a feminist or bringing could bring multiple identities into your work would love to hear more about it so let me just turn to Aija and you talked about sort of the policy change that you felt was needed in your work and how to get at root causes and I'm interested if you could talk a little bit more about the kinds of change you think we need to see in society and sort of what are those leverage points if we're starting to bring about a new paradigm if we're now moving from past into present and the future what are the root causes of injustice that we need to change today well the workforce that I organize in is all predominantly women of color and it's mostly immigrant women who are working here who've come here because of the changes in the global economy and the ways that their home countries have been affected by globalization creating uneven development and a lot of unemployment already or displacement from land and traditional forms of work and so they're here because they're searching for ways of supporting their families and for offering their next generations a better future and then what they come to is workforces like the domestic work industry where their work isn't protected, it's not valued and there's no labor regulation and even organizing isn't protected as workers and basic human rights aren't respected and so it's a really good lens into looking at the kind of change that we need to see in this world because as working class immigrant women of color there's no separating race from gender from class, from immigration and it shows us the way in which all of those things are so integrated and the ways in which different forms of oppression are fundamentally dependent on each other and tied to each other so you can't actually separate out what the women's movement needs to do from what the racial justice movement needs to do from what the queer liberation movement needs to do it's actually one enormous entangled oppressive system that needs actually the cohesion and the integration of all these movements for change and I think that that is most clear every day in the lives of domestic workers but also can be clear in all of our lives if we just kind of peel it in different ways and so I think that what we need to see is actually a massive movement like what we've seen in past generations that was described earlier and more where there's actually a role for everyone there's no shortage of roles for people in the movement but where actually working class women of color play a really central role because of the lens and the clarity that they can bring to that interconnection of systems of oppression and so for us we actually believe that we need to start bringing these movements and these activities and these actions and these sectors together and one really important way that that can happen is actually through culture and cultural exchange but I think that we need to start figuring out how we converge and how we integrate our different struggles and start to see the connections and then we need to look at ways in which we can support the leadership of working class women of color to be able to help guide and teach and support and organize and to really highlight the integration of these these root causes that really need to be uprooted and refreshed to see the world we want to see so that's what I'm going to do Could you go one step further? I know you work in a multi-generational space too you've talked a little bit before about how the women are working together for a common goal can you describe a little bit are there generational differences do you do not see those differences how do you support one another collaborate to use your word Right well most of the women in domestic workers of 35 and 65 they're domestic workers and there is a tremendous amount of generational sort of solidarity and respect and largely there's a lot of cultural bonds that people share we do a lot of things to build community and build understanding across generations internal to the organization but I think that I've also been fortunate in being able to find mentors in the women's movement and in different movements women of color, activists who have really reached out and been available for young organizers like myself to actually talk to and get advice from and freak out to and vent to and who have said that okay this is actually normal and don't worry so I think it's a combination of just always trying to reach out intergenerally but also building in a culture where different generations are always interacting and actually doing common work together organizing together planning events together cooking together talking and telling stories together thank you KJ did you want to add something to that well actually you know something that I wanted to build on when Malia was talking about paradigm shift overall just to kind of just share some like on the ground real life, real time kind of examples of how we take on some of our our challenges of paradigm shift I mean when you talk about paradigm shift in terms of crime and punishment that's like a huge area of challenge to say the least and this is I'm getting to that question one of the first questions that we used to get when we say no more prisons before we got into the long rigmarole of stuff and we've gotten better at kind of our rigmaroles or how we engage people but it was obviously like the first one what do you do with all the murders, rapists and serial killers and blah blah blah that's the first line that we get most of the time okay and I'm sure everyone's wondering this right now what is the answer so my short answer is that we don't have a one line answer but you know over the years you know at first we went into this lengthy kind of statistical like every talking point let's let's get these are the major kind of points that we want to convey in terms of how to break this down right I can give you statistics upon statistics I can give you different policy reports different and what not but really at the end of the day in obviously we have internally our separate space to really troubleshoot this and build with each other just because we're all in one organization and when I say we all we're talking about three to four people right now and from eight person staff to three to four person staff it's not like we're all on the same page at all right but and now I want to talk about the importance of initiating that dialogue space especially in this technological day and age but now do you know how we engage that question and I would engage it right now with this audience it's much easier to say murderers and rapists and serial killers right now when we talk about the prison system right but if your brother or your sister or your mother or your father right murder somebody just imagine for a moment that you found out that someone in your family committed a heinous act of crime with the first line of question right I could actually go through the steps and like imagine your sister imagine your mother imagine for a second you found out about this let's say even in the past or even now with the first line of question that you ask would that be oh my god what happened to this murderer right what would be the first line of question that you would come up with what happened to so and so fill in the blank in light of the person that you know very well in all the complexity the utter confusion in all the complexity of that person's humanity you would be asking that question where did I go wrong or what did I do where you start thinking about how did I contribute to that or how did we let this happen and that's very much the kind of on a national level if I were to kind of zoom that out on a national level when Columbine shooting happened very much the way in which society at large and I'm talking generically took ownership of what happened where did we go wrong with these children with our children right and I remember like 60 minute specials in terms of psychoanalysis and and where do we go wrong and take an ownership of this right where would we fail what are the signs that we missed and just legislatively in terms of policy wise how it translated following those school shootings is when a lot of these policies that went into effect that really took it got implemented in the urban schools so now in New York City what we have as the impact schools initiative where you have armed police officers in schools is a direct result of a lot of the school violence and school shooting stuff that went into effect and it has an after effect okay so I think when we talk about paradigm shifts just in terms of as an organization from our experience I think my point in trying to say that is this on two levels I think we need to be more descriptive rather than prescriptive it's much easier to have need theories or approaches or whatnot in terms of addressing something but at the end of the day how we're going to change in our day to day interaction with each other and changing notions of who those people are in different spaces I want to encourage everyone to really initiate those dialogue spaces or whatever spaces you're in at the end of the day the confrontation of or interacting ideologies it happens through us so the more when you talk about diversity of identities you're going to have an understanding of all these isms in light of human interaction with other people who embody that identity so the more we the more we kind of brave ourselves out of the comfort zone whatever spaces you initiate and I think this is a perfect example of that in making sure who sits at the table matters and the kind of identities and experiences that are present at that moment matters that's the only way in which we're really going to truly understand not in gender studies courses through texts upon texts not through yet another study those things are good to know to get the lay of the land but in our day to day it's going to be we are the ones that's going to bring that understanding I want to ask the panelists another question and then invite you all to ask questions yourself so I'm just giving you a little heads up if you want to formulate your questions but I want to pick up this theme of technology we've heard a couple of you mention and if in fact you do think that the advent of social networking and blogging and webinars and all of these things even online campaign petitions etc. are fueling your work are they a part of your work at all maybe not I'm curious to know sort of the reality of technology and how it plays out in your Gen X and Gen Y activism so I actually I kind of wish Malia didn't have to leave to make her flight because she is way more articulate than any of us are about this and she uses it a lot in her work but I guess I would say that two things one is that some of what I do is actually to try and combat what technology does we try and actually get people into theaters to be together and so when people can just see stuff on the Internet or go to a movie that makes us a little bit sad but I do think that but I look at my sister for instance who's 18 and she feels like she is a part of something online and I can't question that it's really real for her and she connects with people and she signs petitions and she looks at activist websites I mean she really that is a way in which she engages the world in a very real way so I think my answer would be that I think I have a lot to learn I think that there are probably really really really good ways of using the Internet and that kind of technology that we haven't totally found or mastered yet but I think it's important and I think that it is you know a huge shift societally that we haven't really begun to take the measure of or the temperature of yet that it you know it's easy to just sort of keep going along and every day there's something new and that transition is not stark to us because we're in it every day but then we take a step back and look 20 years behind us and there's this profound difference and I think that that is real and that's something that we have not quite come to terms with or grappled with yet it's coming Aijan do you want to add anything? Sure I think the corporate control of the media has been such a powerful tool and really preventing people from seeing what's really going on in so many places in so many pockets of the world and so I think that for example for domestic workers it's sort of this very highly visible invisible workforce everybody sees the nannies pushing the strollers on the streets but nobody really thinks about it and then as workers who have a struggle who really face a lot of challenges in the workplace that is certainly not visible and so to be able to utilize new media to actually show the work that goes into taking care of kids every day and cleaning homes and taking care of the elderly is actually really powerful so we just discovered all this stuff really behind the time we need the congeneration next panel next but we have a MySpace page and we just put up a bunch of things on YouTube and we've got a blog that's active around the Bill of Rights campaign and we've started to use the website more it's a multilingual website and we've been able to connect with domestic workers around the world through that website so it's we're starting to use it and we're realizing how powerful it really really is and I think for us it's any and all tactics and definitely feel like the media is underutilized so we really want to get on that new tools so if we're having trouble translating we can understand older generations maybe slower on the uptake as well so KJ do you want to add how you're using technology and then we'll take questions from the audience I mean you know briefly I would say there's so many facets of technology both positive and negative and I think the important thing here is to again kind of continuing on my theme of get descriptive and talk specifically about in what context does it have power and in what context does it also create illusions of XYZ I mean for us for example there's a way in which technology has had varying degrees of impact on the one hand for example right now in some ways if you would call it technology I guess one of our campaigns is we formed recently we formed a task force on racial disparity to address what the system calls disproportionate minority confinement in the juvenile justice system this is a system term used by the federal government we call it racial disparity but you can talk about it until you're blue in the face but you have to document it in terms of how is this happening and how do we change it so by numbers so on the one hand one of the ways in which we've been able to do this kind of data collection and analysis we have done a system mapping for example each step of the way of from arrest to what's the next step what's that we're collecting what data we have available in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and geography and offense for who's going through the system and how how are they going to the next stage by what factors what decision making process all that is a very complicated technical process in terms of data gathering and part of what enables us to do a lot of that also is the data system development that has happened right so we're going to literally map out right the what a lot of people say oh that's just kind of rhetoric your liberal what not we're going to map out how it happens right on the other hand because of the developing data systems I don't know if you guys know under Bloomberg there's real time crime center now in terms of the data bank of how things get expedited there's and I won't get into the details of it but you know you have a really everything from precarious to dangerous effects like happening by virtue of these developed data systems being utilized by the criminal justice system that turns a blind eye to a lot of different factors so and then and then I always talk about you know the coffee shops nowadays you know we don't really have as much organic spaces to to converse you know you walk into a coffee coffee shop and everyone's behind a laptop myself included and the kind of your struggle of trying to get people to kind of get out of that mode so I think that you know rather than debating in this kind of dichotomy of good or bad I think if we can get really if we can sink our teeth into being real about the conversations around where it has been as much as we talk about the yeah but you know Malia would talk about some of the ways in which I'm on the executive committee for the gathering for justice and the way in which we've been able to bring together the national everyone coming from all over the country the way which we've been able to really move this and it took a long time with best technology that we have with conference calls and what not it also brought so while that enables that it also makes us realize how precious it is and how really at the end of the day real work goes on in terms of our connection and our like bearing of testimony of each other's commitment really happens face to face so it highlights on both ends the possibility and feasibility that it allows as well as what the limitations are as well thank you so we're eager to hear your questions or your comments over here if you could just tell us your name too as you're introducing yourself we'd appreciate it I'm Judy Lee and I have a question for Kyung-ji I was wondering if you publish that analysis that you do and if so or if not could you tell us why publish which analysis actually there's a preliminary it's not preliminary there's a fiscal version of it that independent budget office actually put out just in December of 2007 very much like they they put a price tag per step per you see the flow chart per square has a so it's caused 520 dollars to arrest somebody for example so they do that breakdown the easiest way in which we do this breakdown is by dollar signs right and that's usually tends to be the primary impetus so what we're going to do is take that template the dollar sign template and we're going to add the other data that we have available and of course the biggest hurdle as much as this is public information the biggest hurdle is not only getting the data from the probation department different agencies and the police but it's what we're finding out is that people are not keeping it in the same format right and they're not keeping track of it so we're just trying to get them to the race ethnicity gender geography and offense which we think is like the basic thing thank you other questions comments please Elizabeth yeah hi Elizabeth Sackler I have a question as we're all hoping and looking forward to and participating in I think a paradigm shift and at perhaps with the ultimate goal of outright revolution from where we're sitting how given and I think I don't know I'll pose it to all of you but it came up in my mind when Olivia was talking about your younger sister and use of the internet and that real world for her in the virtual world how can that happen how do we have a paradigm shift online and I don't mean literally a paradigm shift online but I mean if everybody is immersed if so many people are increasingly immersed in the virtual world how do we make a real change I think it's a real problem you know I think it is easy to tune out and feel like you're still doing something right I get emails all the time like if I click on this link a dollar is going to go to breast cancer research and I click and I'm like oh I did a really good thing today and I didn't really so I think that's certainly the danger but I think what KJ is talking about the potential to bring people together who might not otherwise be able to come together so for instance you know the work we do with emancipate we have seven artists that are meeting every month but we need to keep them in touch and there are ways in which we're able to use technology to make that happen and so I think you know and that's different from Facebook right there's this whole other Facebook Myspace social networking thing that I think is I like hearing from people that I went to middle school with but I don't think it's going to help me be a better activist so you know I think the answer is but I do think it's something that we need to be grappling with and figuring out how to use better and figuring out how to keep sacred the space that we have together physically as well you know so coming to places like this to be together I think is going to continue to be crucial I also wonder what it's a symptom of you know I think that there are four generations trying to sit around the same leadership tables at the same time and there's not often enough space created to incorporate all of those voices so hearing from millennials that they can contribute a dollar through Facebook causes that goes to an issue and direct money to an issue without having to join a board because they wouldn't even know how to access it or you know sign a petition because they know when they add up the collective power of that they might go to create change you know in some ways I wonder if the technology allows younger people to participate in civic life in a way that they wouldn't have been able to access previously so you know I I think it's a you know I do think it's a problem it's hard to think about how to create these paradigm shifts online but I also wonder what's missing that's so attractive to them that they're going online I just wanted to say it wasn't clear I didn't I guess I didn't I don't really expect that there is a way to do it online I guess it really has to do with my belief that we have to be present in real time in order to create paradigm shifts or revolutionary changes and if so many people are increasingly glued to isolated interactions how are we going to start to work together in real time I think we need to watch what's happening online with younger people I mean I think that's certainly my prejudice against the internet too right how do we do anything if we're not together but I think I think there's wisdom there that we don't necessarily totally understand and that we are better than saying this is a problem that we need to solve I think we are better off saying this is something we don't yet totally understand and there are young people who seem to and to watch what that is and to try and learn from it and maybe guide it is where I would go with it the move on the money that's been raised through move on and directed even specifically the Obama campaign is something that we could maybe look at and learn from and it's been the vehicle while they haven't physically come together really a generation has come together and had a voice in that particular part of the election also you know what I was going to say is you know if we could look at it as if we could downplay it a little bit and look at it as much as it's been phenomenal and I think there's been a lot of discussion and hype around it by virtue of and legitimately so but I think especially now that we have couple of decades under our belt to kind of look at it critically as we are doing now I think if we could look at it as a new tool rather than a new frontier in just in terms of framing it and also as much as you know I guess it's kind of an analogy you know instead of instead of saying you know instead of trying to censor it out you have to look at you know how it is how it is being used in the part of whoever we're trying to reach so for us as much as you know as much as we you know moan and grunt at the way in which my space has like taken over in some of the interactions and whatnot we've also when we were running our PMP training academy which is for young people ages 814 to 18 so you could imagine kind of how technology has been playing out we just really have to take a step back and let's really look at exactly how it is and why it is playing out the way it is in their lives and then integrate it and use it as a tool as a pedagogical tool as well so not just a you know let's take a you know demographic kind of survey of how they use it but let's look at how this is going to be a real like integrative you know tool in our like kind of pedagogy of how we're working with them so I think if we can put in that perspective the way in which we look at it the way in which we approach and use it would be a little different and we saw a few more hands Sarah did you have a question? Sarah Gould I'm interested that you are all working that none of you although some of you come closer than others but none of you is working in what might be called from the baby boomer generation a women's organization and so the the networks that you come into contact with are I think women and men like yourselves who are doing organizing with women but not from and not from a women's organization place so what my question is do you find do you find kindred spirits? one of the things we are one of the notions that the Miss Foundation and Third Wave Australia some other organizations a wider group of organizations have been working with is feminist social justice so which comes from this experience of being in many rooms with people who are doing social justice work and often times from a very deep race and class analysis but not from a very deep gender analysis so I'm wondering your experience in your networks do you find that there is a strong gender race class analysis or not and what are your thoughts about that? no I think that there is not a strong gender race class analysis in most spaces I think there's always one or two frames or lenses that get sacrificed and I think that there is still sadly a level of sexism that's very prevalent within the social justice movement and a way in which gender and sexism it is rarely talked about let alone patriarchy as a system of oppression and so I think it's really important that we actually play a role as feminists in the social justice movement that we actually organize and we actually push for there always to be a gender analysis and perspective and there has to be a campaign around that it doesn't just happen because you say it should it has to be a deliberate strategy and I would say that depending on which space you're in it's also a question of a race analysis is missing in a lot of spaces that in a race and class analysis can often be missing in a women's movement space and so I think it's like trying to figure out as we move into the future how do we quickly read what's the internal campaign that needs to happen in any given space and then find ways of organizing that campaign to actually move forward and I think the lens of feminist social justice or social justice feminism is really helpful because it really names the integration that I was talking about of these different parts of the movement into one framework and I think that integration is going to be key to how we move forward and to really address the root causes I guess one quick anecdote I would share is that we we had a lot of questions come to us in terms of do you guys have a gender specific program working with young women in the system and what not it's been a long long discussion and sharing of different experiences one of the things that we had identified in terms of looking at the landscape was well we identified other allies who were doing organizationally, institutionally, programmatically very gender specific stuff but in the course of discussing this we also made observations among many in terms of us notice that in our organization we have a very strong women leadership especially in the second half of the organizational development and there's something to be that a lot of young women what we were bringing up was that we are because vast majority of the people getting locked up are men and young men that assumption is that this is a kind of men of color issue so to speak and there's been all kinds of interesting dynamics and interactions as we come to different spaces and by virtue of that without getting into all the different stories by virtue of that in that interaction actually I think has been a lot of paradigm shift in terms of what from perception on both sides so there's been that and we've been trying to actually take that to a different level but just programmatically speaking non-profit institutional landscape we're like we partner up with them there was someone the lady in the red jacket down here is a question this is more of a comment where I said I'm 37 now the shift has already happened these spaces that these young children converse in are real to them the feminist sites even the VR game environments from Warcraft Second Life Eve Online they are real spaces to them and the old notion of coffee shops is gone it's never coming back we have to learn how to deal with these spaces as reality and I don't know if at my age or anybody my age can do that it's really up to them to harness that power and that's all I wanted to say thank you for our reality check when I figure out to create an avatar on Second Life I'll meet you there there's a gentleman in the back of the question thanks for your patience we're videotaping if you don't mind so I'm going to be recorded in my standard question it fell apart actually I guess I'd have my name is Terence first of all I appreciate you all for creating this space to use one of the words we use paradigm shift space I guess first of all I arrived about a half an hour late so I didn't really get to hear if feminism was sort of defined but tempted for themselves to make clear what they mean when they invoke the term feminism I guess for me that comes to mind in light of the fact that I'm a graduate student spent time talking about high theory and the spaces in which I have these conversations about gender it strikes me as men being quite often some of the most strident feminists depending upon how you define feminism I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's perhaps going back to what Olivia was saying with respect to coming from if you're in an Ivy League institution odds are you had a very privileged background and if you're a female same goes therefore perhaps for females who end up in those spaces they don't quite identify with the feminist label as much and so men having encountered some of the criticisms of gender maybe more conscious of those concerns and therefore try go out of the way in fact to be feminist so to speak and so I was just wondering very quickly whether anyone would define feminism and whether you would comment on what you think the role of men are in gender analysis you said, someone said I don't recall who, that it was going to be critical to have poor women particularly poor women of color domestic women in leadership positions that was sort of in and of itself a necessity if we're going to have progress I wonder if that's not true as well with respect to men being included in the conversations of this kind and then I guess the second thought that I had was sort of like the irony that we're meeting at the Brooklyn Museum in light of the fact that we're commenting on people and oppressed people I think probably are least likely to have avatars to be on second life so the paradigm shift that's occurred has certainly not occurred for those people quite frankly in the neighborhood of the other than Philadelphia we probably have like one house at a 10 with people with internet in their house so we have to be conscious of context when we talk about technology and its impact upon people's lives and so I was wondering if we could just highlight this scrambled question comment upon it as you see fit thank you so I heard defining feminism the role of men in feminist spaces technological access to low income people so I think I definitely appreciate the comment about technology I think that that's important to remember as we think about organizing tools I would imagine we all have different definitions of feminism I think my favorite is the bumper sticker feminism is the radical notion that women are people and I think for me it's as simple as that feminism is the idea that we are all equal period that's it and I think some of the complexity comes in when we get into the like oh but feminists are these bra burning men hating people who are other than me but I think for me the definition is as simple as that and I think that in my own particular experience men have been some of the strongest feminists in my life and I think I've been lucky enough to be in organizing circles where that's the case but I would also say that particularly working in the theater there's a phenomenon of organizations led by men that are held up by young women and I think that that often tends to be the case in older activist organizations as well I don't know if this is a direct answer to your question but I think that well I guess I would just say that I think it's very obvious that men need to be part of the conversation as well I mean it's not because we're talking about social justice organizing we're talking about people working together and not about bubbles because I'm conscious of the hour I would ask and because we're organizers and activists if you want to just say like two words about next steps that you would give the audience as you're leaving sort of what are the next steps that they might take from this conversation out into the world perfect I have here flyers on Saturday June 7th this coming Saturday there's going to be a huge march for the domestic workers bill of rights at City Hall at 11 a.m. and your presence will make a world of difference in the lives of over 200,000 women who do this work who are fighting for basic labor rights so if you can please come out get brunch and do whatever you got to do in the morning but show up at City Hall at 11 on Saturday June 7th and yeah we'd really appreciate it I have flyers here I've also got postcards and stickers to support the bill of rights and if you're interested in getting involved our website is www.domesticworkersunited.com or .org and you can also email us through the website thanks I would like a sticker I think I would like to encourage everyone to talk to someone who is not their age about all this stuff so if you're an older feminist find a younger feminist to mentor and if you're a younger feminist go learn from someone and it could be a man or it could be a woman it could be a puppy an avatar yeah I'm going to build on both points and I would put in an extra plug for Ijin's event part of it also we're talking about we all go to a lot of these panels and conferences for the moment and we have best intentions and I think we kind of get absorbed back into our own kind of everyday lives but I do think that if we are going to talk about anything, paradigm shift, all that stuff at the end of the day comes down to everyday initiatives no matter how much you hear about it from people, domestic workers united to whatever things but you're not going to get that perspective unless you're present so I think that presence even for those of us like activists we get jaded and we're like oh god I'm doing this I don't need to go to certain rallies or whatnot but I think it's important for us to really put ourself's task in terms of applying ourselves in different modes of being and relating to each other so on that note I would just encourage everyone to try to push yourselves outside of the box and kind of identify what different modes of learning and being you can kind of initiate so that's that's my last note so I see Dr. Sackler wants to do the close, before we do I just want to thank you all for being here and thank our panelists Olivia Greer, Ken Rhee and Malia LaZoo and thank you for hosting us at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art thank you very much I really do hope and I thank you all for being here and sharing your wisdom and your smarts and your activism and I hope that we can continue this approach this dialogue that we all begin to work and move together in wonderful important ways that have begun I'd like to thank the Ms. Foundation and 2164 for sponsoring this event for the center and also to let you know that Christina Biagi who is an artist is going to be doing a talk the title of her talk is the inspiration excuse me the inspiration of activism in art and it will be in the center in the forum on June 15th and Christine Quinn who is speaker of city council is going to be here in this auditorium for the Elizabeth A. Sackler wild card speaking on health starts with you which is her initiative in the city for especially women who do not have easy access to health care and how important that is and what is available so I'd like to invite you to join us down in the hall of the Americas for a small reception and opportunity to speak to our panelists and to our moderator and to one another and I thank you very much for coming thank you very much Sharna and thank you panelists very much