Leaders. This is just over an hour. There are so many of you. I just took a class on how to publix week but youre the biggest promise spoken front of so im glad there are a warm welcome here. I want to thank everyone who has been organizing the womens convention. It was amazing yesterday and it will be amazing today. Many have worked tirelessly to make this possible. Mark, i am theie cofounders of the ba rudolph foundation. We work to level the Playing Field for women pursuing careers in Public Service and the finances. Specifically, we find unpaid internships. We provide mentorships and professional Development Workshops and networking, ranging from salary negotiation to speaking with confidence. We believe that all people, regardless of gender, ethnicity, economic status, or any other aspect of your identity, you should be looking work in washington dc or any other city. If you want policy to reflect people in impacts, you need people from all backgrounds of the policymaking table. That opportunity to change the , it shouldntou exist only for the people who can afford to work for free. Excited toy i am so introduce the moderator of this mornings session, carmen perez. She is a role model and an inspiration to the women we support. He has done it herself she spent her life working for social justice including fighting is the prison industrial complex. She served as they executive director of gathering for justice. National, one of the cochairs of the womens march on washington. Carmen received the justice Freedom Award at the fci knows Martin Luther king civil and human rights awards. Top 50ne of fortunes women World Leaders and one of times most inferential people. Please join me in welcoming to the stage, carmen perez. [applause] good morning, everyone. How is everyone doing . Are we fired up . Are we ready to go . Yes. Thats what i like to hear. Morning, we are going to have an amazing, amazing conversation about intersection audi. Before we do that, i want to give some love to some folks. First of all, i want to give some love back to you for showing up this early. Thank you. Say, howst want to many of you have gone to the social justice city . Yes. Thats such an amazing place for was aause, initially, it vision that was implemented by a woman named nikita. Im excited you have been able to go visit. Theres so many things you participated in and im glad to say the geo tv team sent out 10,000 texts reminding people to vote next week in key races in virginia, new jersey, michigan, and other states. Room 350 all weekend. Go visit them, please go there. Lets get started here. Waiting, ladies . We are going to bring up Jennifer Austin jones, who is a ceo. She is part of a policy fighting and advocacy organization. Toya who is aand political director for our revolution, future for grassroots and congressional politics. Lets give it up for erika. We have the ceo of been the arc bend the arc jewish action and unapologetically Jewish National organization working for justice, inclusion, and equity in the u. S. Yes. We have rebecca, a former Obama White House staff and senior fellow for disability policy at the center for american progress. [applause] carmen we have liliana, a trans latina working to uplift trans women of colors voices. Wiley, the Senior Vice President for social justice. A Senior Vice President for social justice and the former chair of the independent Oversight Agency from new york citys police department. Yes. Last but not least, we have the executive director of the San Francisco area Office Council of islamic relations. [applause] carmen i have to say, i am excited to moderate the panel this morning because intersectionality is my existence. I am a mexicanamerican woman who grew up in Southern California in a Poor Community where there were gangs but i also grew up playing basketball. There are different themes i intersect with. Intersectionality allows me to be my whole self. Feminismudied chicana at uc santa cruz under leadership, i learned the word intersectionality. That social identities, systems of oppression, and Group Identities intersect to create a whole that is different from the component identities. So, with all that said, a lot of us, what we were organizing the womens march on washington, were intentional about being intersectional. With the panel, we will gain we can actually begin to incorporate that term and ideology into our work and every day lives. And i also want to say that although there was this visibility to it during the womens march, people have been organizing intersectionally for many, many decades. It is not a new concept. It is not a new term. It is now becoming more visible. We will go ahead and go across the board. And i know that we had it is about, you know, and we will have a casual conversation. Are you already for this . [cheers] want to start off with, because we have powerhouses on the stage now. I wanted to start off with me asking all of you, especially because oftentimes, people, and women, especially all of you, effectivewerful, woman and do not think it is achievable. You are often like, ok, that person has organized for 20 years. How can i even get there . So i kind of wanted to start by dispelling the myth that rome was built in one day. And i want to ask all of you, what was your first job . When i was 11yearsold, i had a paper route. How many of you had a paper route. Yes. And now i am the executive director of an organization and cofounder. But it really took many years. And along the journey, it allowed me to embrace several identities, ideologies that have supported my ability to become more intentional about my work. We will start with you. Jennifer good morning, everybody. Excited to be here and grateful for the opportunity to have a conversation with all of you and the esteemed panel. I am in antipoverty policy and advocacy leader. I run an organization that is staterooted but concerned about the needs of all. It has in the name protestant. I take it to me, and we care about all of our neighbors. We are concerned about everybody. My first job, interestingly, was working on the women, infants, and childrens program, doing research on wic, a program that is at risk right now, which provides food and support to low income mothers. Interestingly, i stumbled into it. I am a child, though, of civil rights leaders. I and the child and greatgrandchild of preachers and activists, social justice leaders. I think for me, growing up in a household where we were told to speak our truth my dad used to say freedom is the ability to say no to a lie. To veto untruth. [applause] growing up in a household where that was poured into us, that is what formed who i am today, i believe. Is this on . Great. My first job. It depends. I am undocumented, so if you ask me what my first legal job was, out it is a whole , different question. My first job, without papers, was at chuck e. Cheese. Me, this question is important to a lot of my frustrations. That i developed as an undocumented woman. After chuck e. Cheese, i worked at a daycare with a lot of undocumented women there for almost a decade, sometimes, working without documents like me. At the same time, i already graduated from Arizona State university. So i was pretty much stuck at a job getting paid less the minimum wage in arizona. And also with a diploma that i couldnt use. That really is one of the very first experiences that got me very, very angry at why i could not use my degree. Working at a day care, i loved those babies, but it was really hard. It was not what i wanted to do. I am grateful that happened, because it pushed me to figure out how to make it better for me and for other women. [applause] good morning, everyone. It is an incredible honor to be here among women. Dishest job was washing at the mall. I moved out of my house when i was six and and was going to c ior old time to s moved out of my house when i was and was going to school fulltime. I was a punk rocker, had bright orange hair, and a shaved head, and that was the job i could get. That will not be a job i could live on, so i am grateful for that job. [applause] first off, carmen, i did not know you were a slug. Carmen banana slug. You are . That means we went to uc santa cruz. So we are slugs. Banana slugs. Carmen perhaps the greatest, most intersectional School Mascot that there is. [laughter] my first job was being a bra specialist for victorias secret. What it taught me and i still use it to this day. People are shocked i put it in my bio, and it is still on my resume. When i tell people is that Public Policy and lingerie is the same thing. You have to make people want to put their money out for something that will, in no way, shape, or form will not impact their lives. It is usually filled with some substance, hot air or oil or Something Else unidentifiable. And you have to make them care about it. Lobbying and larger a yeah, i use it in my daytoday life every day. [laughter] [applause] [cheer] lilianna good morning. My name is lilianna reyes. I think my first job it was a tobacco and Substance Abuse awareness. I was 16 and did not want to work in fast food. I decided i could get a six hour a week office job to literarily e emails and office flyers. Ironically, it has led me to become an lgbt tobacco Treatment Specialist and Substance Abuse specialist. Only because i did the work, and it seems like any job i went to, they said, you did this work . Awesome, get this certification. So i became a specialist without wanting to become one. [laughter] [applause] maya thats a hard one to top. I, like jennifer, grew up with parents who are civil rights activists. So i want to distinguish work and job. One thing my parents and grandparents before them taught us is that it takes work to be a citizen. Our first job is citizenship. [applause] about work as opposed to paid job, the first work was a bunch of us kids, children of the activist organizers it was the time of the vietnam war. We formed a group called children against the vietnam war. I think i was seven. [laughter] the leader of our group was someone you may know, congressman jamie raskin. Who i think was eight at the time. And we would all meet at his house, all five of us, to have organizing meetings for the protests we were going to have against the war in vietnam. Jamie would pull out literarily in his family room, would pull out the coffee table, stand on it, and lecture us on the evils of the war in vietnam. [laughter] meanwhile, this other kid named david was shooting spit balls at my head, and i was trying to hide behind the chair. The point was, in the end of this, our parents help us get a parade permit to have a march down pennsylvania avenue in front of the white house against the war in vietnam. [applause] [cheers] we were called children against the war. I think there were six of us by this time. We had added one more. And the police, expecting this huge, massive, antiwar demonstration, had about 500 Motorcycle Police officers. [laughter] and the only people on the sidewalks were our parents. Which meant 10 to 12 people. Cheering us on as we marched down saying stop the war, stop the war. [applause] [cheers] zahra good morning, everyone. My name is zahra billoo. I am with care the council on American Islamic relations. I am not sure how to follow that. My first job was folding clothes at mervyns. Does anyone remember it . I was sad when it closed. When i was a kid, i really wanted a food service job, which sounds odd to say out loud, especially if you know how hard those jobs are. My parents were not down with that. They were in pursuit of what they thought was the american dream. They said you cannot work in food service. So i worked at mervyns and folded clothes during the holiday season. I will say i am fortunate and cognizant of the privilege i had to work through college and do it for extra money, and not because i needed to pay my bills. By the time i got to law school, i had to work pay my bills. As a product of the California Public education system, i worked all the way through. In my favorite job, the one that in forms the work i do today, where the times where the faculty, organizing professors and students to push back against tuition increases, and with the Service Employees national union, organizing home care workers, security guards, industries often not organized but recognized that we are more powerful when we Work Together. [applause] [cheers] carmen i love all of these stories. I think we did just keep going. I will say that i think this allows us see how your lives are intersectional. We often think that we, as women, are monolithic. But we are not. Your organizing, and the work you do it every single day, why do you think it is important to organize across movements . And do you personally think that this is an effective way to build power . Jennifer i will begin. In my daily work, i am focused on poverty. The needs and concerns of our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, some of us who do not have enough money on a daily basis. If the political, structural, powers had their way, they would look at it just as a class issue. They would look at it independent of race experience and gender experience. They would ignore the fact that when they talk about diversity, in the main, they separate race from gender. When you look at what corporations do today, they place greater emphasis on gender. Or they distinguish between race and gender and not the two together. What that looks like is if i want to meet the quota, if you will, let me hire more women, they do not have to be women of color. Let me hire africanamerican men. Let me hire latino men. Then, that leaves out africanamerican women, latino women, indian women, across the board. If i am fighting poverty, i have to appreciate this intersectionality and the movement has to coexist. That it is not just a race or class or gender issue alone. It has to be looked at together. I have to fight for that intersectionality. Right now, i am addressing issues of criminal Justice Reform. What i am appreciating increasingly in america is that what we do in america is do not appreciate that race and poverty and criminal injustice are all intersected. We look at taking on criminal Justice Reform as though it is just an experience tied to, perhaps, poverty. 80 of people incarcerated are poor. 60 of people incarcerated are latino and black. If we address criminal Justice Reform only through lets look at what is happening in the court systems, but not what is happening in black or latino communities, and look at how people do not have access to jobs, do not have access to education, people of color, then we miss the mark. That is why we have to focus on intersection of all of these things. The last point you have to always remember structural powers that be want to keep things segmented. If we are over here focusing on class, then we are not reshooting the race undercurrent. If we focus on gender alone, we are not looking at how we actually strip away the economic potential. We have to keep the movement focused on intersectionality, so while they try to divide us, we remain united. [applause] so how many of you paid attention to the 2016 president ial election . [laughter] that is really the fundamental, presentday answer to the question. Number one, power should have 3 million moret votes resulted in a different president of the United States, ok . [applause] [cheers] maya and the only reason 3 million plus votes did not was because of something called the Electoral College. And we have the Electoral College because we had slavery. So now the entire country has a man with his finger on the Nuclear Button who assaults women, who forgets the name of servicemen who die in the field, has not dealt with the dreamers ability to continue to work and learn in this country, who have told us that police should be a little rough with people when they get put in police cars, maybe knock their heads against the door, because we never have resolved the fact that, as a country, we have constructed a politics built on race. And race was also built on class and gender. It was. [applause] and we cannot fight any of that unless we recognize that we are in it to together. And that what it fundamentally represents is whether you are a coal miner in kentucky, or a garment worker in new york, or simply a woman taking care of a family at home, that fundamentally, what dr. Martin luther king jr. Said remains true, which is that, fundamentally, we are bound up in it together. And either we are going to rise up together or we will fall together and we will take the rest of the world with us. What that means in terms of our organizing is fundamental. It means that we have to see the relationship between police said,duct, as jennifer criminal justice, education and investment in education, health care, immigration, because all of these have become pushbutton issues to do exactly what jennifer said divide us. We do not have to let that be the case. If we actually see the relationship and be in the these fights in the way we can be. There is nothing more important players started taking a knee during the National Anthem, a white woman who was going to sing the National Anthem took her knee while she sang it. [applause] [cheers] i think intersectionality is important because we see the impact of what happens to extremely marginalized people when Public Awareness heightens. For instance, when the lgbt movement, a very white movement, started to take off, lgbt, specifically trans people and specifically trans people of color were left behind. The year and the