Podcast appearances and mentions of elizabeth fiedler

Self Evident is talking seed oils, coffee consumption & the Spiritual power of food & a nap. Our newest guest host, the elegant Elizabeth Fiedler, talks about how the MAHA movement is focusing on determining the root causes of autism and childhood diseases through nutrition, and how as Christians, we are called to keep our bodies healthy through food, hydration and rest. Alyssa & Elizabeth are both expecting their first babies, and keep Jenna in constant awe as they present their independent study of the right caffeine intake, how (the fruit) dates are bad until they’re good while pregnant, and much more.… Continue Reading

It's the Wednesday politics show. Host Trenae Nuri catches up with State Representative Elizabeth Fiedler, who represents South Philly, about her work-life balance (she's a mother of two who's now expecting twins) and the issues she's focused on in Harrisburg. Fiedler is one of just a few elected officials in the country who's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and she has some thoughts on the future of the Democratic Party.   Want some more Philly news? Sign up for our daily newsletter, Hey Philly We're also on Instagram: @citycastphilly Have a question or comment? Call or text us at 215-259-8170 Interested in advertising with City Cast? Find more info here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As competing legislative priorities battled it out in the state budget endgame, one measure sailed through the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. The newly enacted Solar for Schools program leverages federal funding to cover up to 100% of installation costs for solar arrays at PA public schools -- delivering major cost savings for school districts, new educational opportunities for students, improved climate resiliency for communities, and reduced carbon emission for Pennsylvania. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler of Philadelphia, says this is only the beginning.

Micah and Jared are joined by State Representative Elizabeth Fiedler. The three discuss Rep. Fiedler's work on the Solar for Schools bill, which would incentivize solar education throughout schools in Philadelphia. Other topics discussed are bi-partisan support around the bill, the process moving forward, and advocacy work citizens can get involved with.

On today’s show I am thrilled to welcome State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler and State Sen. Nikil Saval to the show. Rep. Fiedler represents District 184 in South Philadelphia, a seat she won against a deep-pocketed Democratic machine. Let’s face it, in significant sections of Philly, the Democratic Primary is where all the action is. She ran a strong general election campaign with two other members of PA’s own squad, Rep. Summer Lee and Rep. Sara Innamorato, who also won huge upset victories against Democratic machine politicians.  In 2020, State Sen. Nikil Saval won his election to represent the First State Senate District in Philadelphia. Sen. Saval’s district hugs the Delaware River from the Philly airport in the south to Sections of Port Richmond in the north. His election win set a new round of shock waves through the Democratic party establishment and state politics. Yes, Democratic party voters will elect an open socialist to office.  In a remarkable short period of time the progressive left is on the rise in PA and that’s made a huge difference in the political discourse - but perhaps more importantly, what we might call our political horizons. Suddenly things seem possible. What was once PA’s own progressive squad is becoming a battalion.  I wanted to have Rep. Fiedler and Sen. Saval on the show this week because it’s budget season in Harrisburg and they are both part of a renewed push for a People’s Budget along with the great folks at We the People - PA. This time around, however, progressives are exercising their muscles and pushing the political discourse. And not just in the State Capitol. They continue to work with the movements that they have been part of for years. So, it’s a progressive budget and progressive-left movements on the table tonight. Welcome to the show. 

It’s been a harrowing several months...well, OK, several years. But this election season has been run through with racial violence, mass uprisings, unprecedented climate-driven disasters, and a freaking pandemic. And that’s all on top of the Trump administration’s active measures to suppress the vote. Oh, yeah, there’s that steady march toward fascism too. Pretty heavy stuff.  At the same time, we are seeing unprecedented organing - the likes of which I have never seen in our lifetime. For every challenge it seems there has been a corresponding, progressive/left, grassroots movement to meet it. Think about it. From the day that Trump was inaugurated, there have been people in the streets, building power. In 2018, we had huge progressive/left electoral wins at the national level, most notably with AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. Right here in PA, there were also huge victories by the left with the election of Summer Lee, Elizabeth Fiedler, and Sarah Innamorato. And, it looks like we could double...maybe even triple the numbers of progressives heading to Harrisburg after tomorrow’s elections. Beyond elections, we’ve seen organizations like DSA and the Sunrise Movement lead the way showing the world how movements can build power and change the horizon of our politics.  I wanted to change up our format a bit, today. I wanted to bring in a panel of great folks to give us their take on what we can expect when the polls close tomorrow. But, more importantly, I wanted to look ahead to the organizing that will need to happen as soon as those polls close. We will no doubt see people in the streets this week. On Out d’Coup, Sean and I have talked about preparations being made to defend democracy if Republicans try to steal this election. But we can look ahead to a longer horizon too. We will need strategies for a Trump win, for sure. But, perhaps even more so, we need strategies for a Biden administration.  So, today we’ll have a little pre-election roundtable to unpack some of this and to just have a sane conversation in the midst of all the chaos. To help me with this, I welcome: Sean Kitchen, Out d'Coup co-host. Sean is also doing awesome work with PA Spotlight and is a fantastic freelance photographer Shana Rose, creator and host of Sustaining with Shana podcast, sustainability professional, and a member of PASSHE's new Sustainability Development Task Force  Leo Atkinson, Co-Chair of Lehigh Valley DSA, long-time Lehigh Valley resident, and former Fountain Hill council member. co-chair of Lehigh Valley DSA.  We'll give our final takes on Election Day and the kind of organizing that will be necessary as soon as the polls close.  Special shout out to Jonathan Mann, who wrote our theme song, "There Are No People in the Future." Check out all his great work and follow him on Twitter at @songadaymann.

We’re back in record territory when it comes to new COVID-19 cases. New cases are rising in 27 states with Texas, California, Arizona, and Florida showing some the most alarming increases. The enormous Texas Medical Center in Houston reached 100% capacity yesterday. The CDC now says that more than 20 million Americans could have contracted the virus - 10 times more than the official counts.  Unlike the initial explosion of COVID-19 cases that saw older Americans accounting for most cases, younger people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s The Voice of America is now Trump Radio.  Jamaal Bowman ousts Warhawk, Eliot Engle, in the Democratic Party Primary in New York’s 16th district which spans parts of the Bronx and Westchester County. Bowman won the nomination by 25 points.  In another huge exclamation point in growing progressive power in the Democratic Party, AOC blew out her corporate-backed challenger in New York’s 14th district by 51 points. 70% v. Michelle Caruso-Cabrera’s 19%. AOC took to Twitter following her victory to say: “Wall Street CEOs, from Goldman Sachs to Blackstone, poured in millions to defeat our grassroots campaign tonight. But their money couldn’t buy a movement. Thank you #NY14, and every person who pitched in for tonight’s victory. Here’s to speaking truth to power.” Charles Booker pulls ahead of Amy McGrath in the fight for the Democratic Party nomination to challenge Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Senate race.  In New York’s 17th district, Mondaire Jones looks to be heading to Washington after blowing out a three-way race for the Democratic Party nomination. If his twenty-point lead holds, he’ll be one of the first openly gay black men in Congress.  Tik Tok and KPop help sink Trump’s great hope of sell-out crowds in Tulsa.  Bad news for Devin Nunes. A judge rules that he can’t sue Twitter because fake cow hurt his fufus on the platform. That’s a win for Devin Nunes’s Cow and Devin Nunes’s Mom.  There’s a giant dust cloud racing across the Atlantic.  I bet none of you had that on your 2020 bingo card? And...here we go...My Little Pony fans are kicking out the white supremacists from their fan pages. Yes. That My Little Pony.  New York Times releases a damning video that reconstructs the I-676 tear gassing and toruture the Philadelphia Police unleashed on protesters on June 1st.  The Philadelphia Police Department and the City of Philadelphia’s statements on the incident were discredited the day following the event, but the city and the police department drug their feet for 24 days before apologizing and banning the use of tear gas.  Mayor Kenney and Commissioner Outlaw were hoping that an internal investigation would have kept this in the dark.   Move over Bill De Blasio, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney still thinks his political career has any relevance.  He launched a statewide PAC that are leading many to believe that he’s gearing up for a 2022 run at the Governor’s seat.  Christopher Columbus statue in Marconi Plaza in Philly is coming down because the people defending the statue caused so much bullshit attacking black lives matter protesters that the city is removing it.  In a PA Grand Jury report released yesterday slams the PA Department of Environmental Protection for failing to protect people from the effects of fracking. The grand jury said the natural gas industry should bear the expense and risk of fracking, but the DEP “did not take sufficient action in response to the fracking boom.”  PA Stands Up held its 5th The Crisis and The Opportunity Virtual Forum last night featuring Shanna Danielson, Nikil Saval, Summer Lee, Elizabeth Fiedler, and Sara Innamorato. I got to listen in to most of the discussion. It was a great space and you can watch the recording at PA Stands Up Facebook page.   The State Senate passed on Wednesday a major plan that clears the way for the restructuring of the PA State System of Higher Education. The plan will give more power to the Board of Governors and the Chancellor to consolidate schools, eliminate programs, turn existing schools into branch campuses, create new schools, and share administrative services. And speaking of PASSHE, the state-owned universities are rolling out their “return-to-campus plans” this week. Kutztown University’s COVID-19 Public Relations campaign - I mean “Fall 2020 Planning COVID-19 Response” plan - is just loaded with goodies. Students will be required to come up with their own “Safety Plan;” students working in dorms as Community Assistants will now be responsible for the “emotional wellbeing, physical health, and social support,” of students living in their newly establish “KU Family Pod Area” (can’t make this shit up); students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to report suspicious COVID-like behavior to the administration; and, the university will use the pandemic as cover to increase the use of online teaching “even after the current COVID-19 crisis has abated.”  NASA names its headquarters after Mary Jackson, the first black woman engineer. You might remember her as one the three leads in the film Hidden Figures.  I’m on to the second book in Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series: The Parable of the Talents, published in 1998. It was more than freaky that Parable of the Talents takes place during the rise of a right-wing zealot - Senator Jarret from Texas - who whips up racism and promise to “make America great again.” I mean...those exact words.  It was Father’s Day this past weekend which means I got a chance to sample some awesome beer. The highlights from Free Will included the AMAZING Wild Blueberry Cobbler Mash and of course one of my favorites, Safeword.  Free Will also came out with a new release this week: Walk Awhile With Me - English style Pub Ale brewed with a base of Maris Otter and a bit of Crystal malt, hopped with Golding and Chinook. Notes of crispy toffee, biscuit, and herbs of the earth. 4.2% ABV I was also gifted two crowler’s from McAllister Brewing Company based in North Wales - Mandated Introvert, an “IPA Sour” and Shovel Buddy, a really nice New England IPA.

Welcome back to Your Vote Matters! In this episode, Dan, Talyce, and Ellie cover the importance of local elections, and explored the various roles that young voters can play in them. First, we spoke to Elizabeth Fielder, a Representative for District 184 in the Pennsylvania State House and candidate for re-election. Elizabeth recounts how local elections are just as important than national elections, even though they are not always as popular as national elections. After the Break, Dan, Ellie, and Talyce explain the impacts of state governments, and why voting for their members is important. They then shared their memories of local races that were influential to them. Finally, we spoke to CEEP Communications Staffer, Cynthia Capota about political parties, their development, and how they impact politics and voter turnout in the U.S. This episode was full of amazing information that you absolutely won’t want to miss! Resources Mentioned in this Podcast: Vote.org COVID-19 Updates: https://www.vote.org/covid-19/ Campus Elect: https://campuselect.org/ Cover Art: Brandie Stonge @hummingbee_studio The views of our guests do not reflect the views of our organization

Time to party like it’s 1988!  Joe Biden, yes that Joe Biden, was caught plagiarizing parts of his climate change plan.  Hitting control C and control V on your keyboard is not an acceptable climate change plan. The worst thing is that he’s plagiarizing from a Fossil Fuel industry-backed organization, the Carbon Capture Coalition as well as the labor and environmental group the BlueGreen Alliance. And this week, Biden says he’s for repealing the Hyde Amendment, then he’s against it. This morning his campaign says he’s for repeal again. He must have been watching Elizabeth Warren’s town hall on Wednesday and decided to steal some her strategy too. Recall that the Hyde Amendment poor, working class, and young women from using government-backed health insurance to help pay for safe and legal abortion. Speaking of Warren’s town hall, that’s how you do it. Democrats should take lessons in how to answer questions from Warren. Meanwhile, Bernie went to Wal-Mart shareholders meeting while calling on supporters to show up on picket lines in support of striking graduate student workers at the University of Chicago. The DNC is out on the vanguard again, saying they will absolutely not hold a debate on climate change that has been called for by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and former Obama cabinet official Julián Castro, along with the Sunrise movement. Worse still, the DNC threatened to ban Inslee from the official DNC debates is he participated in a debate on climate change held by another organization. Tom Perez must have missed a new report out of Australia says that “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.” Democrats fail to consider the political costs of NOT impeaching Trump. We’ll see how long Pelosi can stick to her line that she doesn’t want to impeach Trump, she wants him in prison. David Dayen’s got a great new piece in the latest edition of In These Times on how Amazon is taking over our lives. It’s an excellent report and analysis on why we’ve got to limit the power of these mega-corporations. A new report from the accounting group Deloitte shows that the net worth of Americans between the age of 18 and 35 has dropped 34% since 1996. Governor Wolf released his “Restore PA” plan that aims to rebuild Pennsylvania’s aging infrastructure.  The plan would lock in natural gas drilling for the next two decades. Progressive Democrats such as Elizabeth Fiedler, Daniel Otten, Sara Innamorato, and Summer Lee opted out of putting their names on the bill and climate scientist Michael Mann told the Capital Star that he “hopes [Governor Wolf] will reconsider this misguided plan. Daylin Leach goes full Trump by exonerating himself and leaking a preliminary version of the Senate investigation into his allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct.  His actions forced Jay Costa, Vincent Hughes, Art Haywood, Larry Farnese, Lindsey Williams, Tim Kearny, Maria Collett and everyone else in the Party to call for his resignation. The Pennsylvania Senate voted Mike Turzai’s egregious EITC tax credit and charter school give away legislation out of committee and just in time for the budget season.  The bill would add $100 million to the EITC tax credit program and would increase the administrative fees from 10% to 20% so billionaire-backed special interests groups like the Commonwealth Foundation can make more money off the backs of Pennsylvania’s poorest children. Plain View Project releases a report showing racist, misogynist, and violent Facebook post by 330 Philadelphia police officers. Summer Lee’s UNITE PAC gets the goods. U.S. Navy looking to get support for its new rail gun by tying it to NASA’s lunar base plans. The electromagnetic railgun will be tested on a U.S. warship soon, could be used to launch payloads off the moon toward Earth or into deep space without the use of chemical propellants. Free Will Brewery’s new release this weekend is Angel: Hop Blend no. 2 - the second iteration of their “No Boil IPA was brewed with local malt from Deer Creek Malthouse and heirloom bloody butcher corn from Castle Valley Mill.”   On Wednesday, June 12th, Free Will Brewing joins with Tré Locally Sourced to present "Grilled & Chilled" as their latest sour cellar series. Grilled and Chilled will be a 5-course pairing will feature some of your favorite brews and soon to be favorite dishes.

Elizabeth Fiedler was a respected reporter for Philadelphia public radio station WHYY. In 2017, she set her career aside to run for a State House seat in South Philly. Challenging an incumbent, and going up against Philly's entrenched Democratic machine, Fiedler won handedly. Not only that, but turnout in the district was as high as it had been in the last Presidential election. Amanda McIllmurray was at the helm of the campaign through that competitive May primary. We talk about the tactics and principles that led to Fiedler's win, and which may have led to such a stunning turnout for the district.

I'm Beth Finn, first time candidate for Philadelphia City Council at Large. This week, I talk about the logistics of fundraising and growing my circle of supporters, my first conversations with voters, and standing on the shoulders of giants. I also emphasize again the importance of the mid-term elections this Fall, being a candidate, and building up political capital. --- Links --- Tina Davis http://votetinadavis.com/ Mike Doyle https://www.mikedoyleforpa.com/ Gretchen Driskell https://votedriskell.com/ Elizabeth Fiedler https://elizabethfiedler.com/ Katie Muth https://www.katiemuthforpasenate44.com/ Kristin Seale https://www.kristinseale.com/ Melissa Shusterman https://www.melissashusterman.com/ Moving Philly Forward https://www.movingphillyforward.org/ Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) http://boldprogressives.org/ --- Stay in Touch --- Website: www.Beth4PHL.com/ Donate: secure.actblue.com/donate/beth4phl?refcode=podcast Facebook: www.facebook.com/Beth4PHL

Four progressive women with Democratic Socialist platforms running for Pennsylvania State House won big last week in their primaries. All unseated establishment male incumbents. All four – Summer Lee & Sara Innamorato of Pittsburgh and Kristin Seale & Elizabeth Fiedler of Philadelphia – join the show to discuss their respective races, their experience in taking on the establishment, how their people-powered campaigns helped them win, DSA's role and what their Dem Socialist platforms meant to them, and what this means all across the country going forward. All that plus listener questions and comments and much more!

We will not have our regularly scheduled Friday show this week, but we just had to bring you a post-PA primary recap. It was a huge night for PA's progressive future.  John Fetterman defeats Mike Stack for Lt. Gov. Stack becomes first Lt. Gov. to lose reelection.  4 DSA Candidates Make it to the general election. DSA Members Sara Innamorato and Summer Lee take down the Costa family machine in Pittsburgh. They easily defeat Dom and Paul Costa by 2-1 margins. Elizabeth Fiedler wins a four-way primary with a majority of the vote in South Philly. Kristin Seale will be facing off against DelCo Republican Chris Quinn in November. PA Democrats flip a Bucks County state house seat that Republicans have controlled for over 35 years. Helen Tai, daughter of Chinese immigrants, will be representing that seat for the next 6 months.  Mary Gay Scanlon, a Ballard Spahr lawyer, defeats Johnny Doc and Bernie-backed Rich Lazer in the crowded PA 05 primary.  Ballard Spahr enjoys breaking unions, supports charter schools, and works with Comcast. Progressives were torn over Bernie backing Lazer. Madeleine Dean wins her primary in the PA 04. Greg Edwards came up short in the PA-7, but at least Morganelli was defeated. Susan Wild will head to the general election in November.  Scott Wagner pulls out a victory in the Republican primary for Governor. Governor Wolf's campaign comes out swinging before the ink is dry on the primary results. And, anti-immigrant Lou Barletta will take on Bob Casey this fall.  Rick Saccone loses, again.  He’ll have to take his waterboarding towel and free meals from lobbyists somewhere else. At least he's got his godly heritage.   

For the first time in a very long time, Philadelphia's diverse 184th House District will be getting a new state representative. Competing to replace the retiring Bill Keller are Nicholas DiDonato Jr., Elizabeth Fiedler and Tom Wyatt. Each stopped by 20 by Seventy to chat with David Thornburgh about their credentials, their sense of the district, what they'd fight for in Harrisburg, and what they'd never support, no matter what. David also chats with co-host Chris Satullo about the stakes in this year's state elections. Listening to this lively conversation is a great way to prepare for going to the polls on May 15.

Democrat Conor Lamb's victory is a rebuke of Republicans. But Lamb is far from an ideal candidate, and so the race also raises a perennial debate between the left and liberal center over what kind of alternative to the Republican right we need. Dan's guests are Elizabeth Fiedler, Sara Inammorato, and Summer Lee, three leftist women running for state rep in Pennsylvania — all three DSA members endorsed by their local chapters. Other stuff: Patrick Blanchfield's article on guns and neoliberalism discussed last week is here splinternews.com/the-market-cant-solve-a-massacre-1823745509 Thanks to Verso Books. Check out the free e-book Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo and Police: A Field Guide versobooks.com/books/2530-police. Support us with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig!

It’s no secret that 2017 was a trash year, and 2018 hasn’t been…easy. But somehow, we’re still here, making it work—and even finding inspiration, joy, and success. We want to talk about how we’re coping during even the most trying political and cultural times. To help us, we sit down with none other than a climate scientist working in government to find out how _she’s _keeping her head up in rough times. > I try as much as I can to talk with college kids or high school kids and most of the time my message is just, “Hi, I’m a scientist and I also happen to be a woman.” It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that. > > —Allison Crimmins, climate scientist Here’s what’s in store in Episode 6 (and as always, there’s a full transcript): Show notes First up, we look back on last year and how we made it through. We talk about how even though we had some big successes, it was hard to feel accomplished while the world seemed to burn in turmoil. We discuss: How we stayed (and stay) focused amidst a never-ending news cycle Why asking for help is important Why being accountable to something or someone can serve as a bright north star We also discover how to recognize when it’s OK to just turn off and tune out. Hint: it’s always OK when that’s the most healthy choice. Interview: Allison Crimmins Our guest this week is Allison Crimmins, a badass friend who works on climate change in Washington, DC, during the day and cancer research at night—no big. She takes us through her typical Tuesday and tells us how the hell she’s doing these days. We cover: Doing good work during crap times. How limitations and constraints can feel frustrating but also provide opportunities to be more creative and strategic about accomplishing goals. Why good communication matters—and if you truly understand and believe in your work, you should know how to talk about it. Being seen and heard as a woman in a male-heavy field, and normalizing it so we can talk more about the actual work we’re doing. Cutting through the mysticism around science and STEM, and how you don’t have to be a super nerdy genius to be a scientist—you just have to be curious. When kids draw what they think a scientists looks like, the results will astound you! (No, they won’t, but we need to change that.) How bobsledding and curling might just reignite our faith in the human spirit. Fuck Yeah of the Week Finally, we swoon over the unveiling of the absolutely brilliant Obama portraits. If you haven’t checked the work of Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama, and Kehinde Wiley, who painted Barack Obama—do it now. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _   _CodePen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _ Transcript Katel LeDû [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. In fact, my company, A Book Apart, runs on Shopify … and great news: they’re hiring more awesome people to join their team. And they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team, and work on the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. [0:39] Jenn Lukas [Music fades out] Hey and welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. SWB You know we all know that 2017 was a trash year, and 2018 looks like it’s going to be stressful too. So today we are going to talk about what we do during these tough times, how do we stay motivated, and how do we keep it together. To help us do that, we’ll talk with Allison Crimmins, who is an environmental scientist working in government — yes, government — on issues related to climate change. Talk about tough times. But before we steal all of her coping methods, let’s talk about the state of our union. KL I don’t know, I had a weirdly good professional year last year, and I don’t know, it was in a lot of different ways. I really wanted to grow in a couple of different areas that I previously didn’t know if I was going to be able to. We had sort of locked down a lot of things that go into the day to day running of A Book Apart, and one area was just marketing. I really was like, “I don’t feel confident in this. I really want to get a better grasp of it,” and [exhales deeply] I feel like I got better at it by asking for help and just realizing that I wasn’t going to get there alone and that I really — I wanted to get stronger in that area and, you know, some others to actually sustain the business. It was really cool to be able to find that and also, I don’t know, just feel like I had really made some progress and felt like I achieved something. And while I felt kind of successful and that I had made an accomplishment, there were mornings, like a lot of mornings, that I would wake up and just feel like, “What the fuck? Like maybe this doesn’t even matter.” It was a weird feeling to have that juxtaposition. It was tough. SWB Yeah, I mean I definitely felt like that too, right? I was working on a book for a lot of last year: finishing writing it, going through the editorial process on it, waiting for it to come out, doing all of the legwork in advance of it coming out. You know, you need to be excited about it, right? Like you have to be excited about your own book if you want anybody else to be. And meanwhile I would be reading Twitter, because I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on in the thing that my book is about, and what do you see on Twitter? Well, you see a bunch of garbage the president said, and all of this stuff that was just really depressing, and it was really difficult to keep focused on anything else, and I felt like that was hard. It’s hard to think about things that are going well and to think about like, you know, if you get praise for something, or sales at A Book Apart go up, or whatever, and to be excited about it when you’re also kind of like, at a macro level what the fuck even? KL Yeah and I mean I think for me too just feeling like, if you’re excited about it, and you’re feeling like, “Ok, we made progress, we had successes.” That obviously rubs off on other people and you want them to feel like things are moving in the right direction. So it’s hard to, obviously not just feel that for yourself but then, make sure [laughing] that you’re not falling apart and that that’s spreading. JL So Katel, what did you do on those days when you were wondering, does it matter? Does this matter? How did you cope with that? KL I mean really and truly it was the fact that I’d done the work of putting a network together and really surrounding myself with people who knew the right steps to take and in the right direction, and having folks that I could rely on. So I think — I mean also being accountable to having a vision and making sure that you are moving in the right direction was huge. JL It’s weird to say this but it’s almost refreshing for me to hear this just because, you know, I think a lot of times we have feelings like that: is everything going to be OK? Am I going to make it through this time of my life? Whether it’s because of external situations going on or internal ones, or just things you can control, things you can’t control. So it’s almost refreshing to hear that other people go through that as well and that just because you have those feelings doesn’t mean that you won’t get through them or learn how to cope with them at the same time. So I think it’s really nice. So thank you for sharing that. SWB Yeah, Jenn, did you ever feel dissonance last year because you had a baby: big exciting thing, awesome thing, not without its own challenges, right? [Laughter] JL Different challenges. SWB But where it’s like, “Oh my god the largest source of joy I’ve ever had in my entire life also what the hell is happening in this country?” 5:16 JL Yeah, I’ll tell you that I struggled, I think, with feelings of guilt a lot last year because I turned off. I turned off a lot of social media, I turned off a lot of news. The current events and just keeping up with sort of like the social network around me I felt all to be a little too overwhelming while trying to make sure that I stayed healthy to be able to give birth to a child. SWB Like what can we do to make you feel less guilty about that? Because like I think you should feel no guilty about that. JL Thank you for saying that but, you know, it’s hard because I’ve read — there were so many great articles and I tried to read about like what can we do, what could you do last year, and how could you get involved. And I have great friends that were doing a lot of things locally that were really awesome. At the time, you know, I was eight months pregnant. Besides just wanting to sleep all the time, like physically you have this physical being inside of you [laughter]. That is like draining. KL Draining you. JL It’s like having this alien sort of inside — he’s going to listen to this when he’s older and he’s going to be like, “You called me an alien.” But I mean like that’s what it is. SWB You know what? Here’s the thing: your kid is never going to be interested in your podcast [laughter]. KL That’s true. But we’re still — by the way, we’re still going to be doing it then. So just — [laughter] get ready. SWB We’ll be extremely famous. JL Um but I mean you have this, like, life force inside of you, sucking your energy and making you tired, and then I would like try to turn on the news for a second and I would be like, “I can’t.” For me it was really important to recognize that I couldn’t. Katel, you mentioned accountability and um, you know, there’s being accountable to employees or a team. For me, I felt accountable to, at the time, my unborn son and being like, “I need to make sure that I’m doing this for you.” So sometimes having a thing that’s not you or a person or — can help you figure out how to make it through this next step. Sometimes I can’t see what the next five steps are, so if I can see through someone else’s eyes it helps me figure out where I need to go. SWB Well, I mean I think it’s very important that now that you have this child, right? What is one of the biggest things that you can do for the world? Raise a son who’s a good person and who’s not a terrible misogynist. I would greatly appreciate that and that’s also — that’s a big task, right? You’re raising a kid in a culture that is going to present some problems and you’re going to be aware and there to work through it. So you didn’t watch the news for awhile. I do think it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in the world. I’m not trying to say that like, “Oh and none of it matters. Hashtag selfcare, turn it off all the time!” I just mean that you have to recognize what’s going to be useful for you at any given moment in your life and at the moment in your life when you’re like, “I cannot actually do anything about this because I don’t have anything to give.” Turning it off is probably the most productive. So it’s not sucking more energy from you, right? So I actually I applaud that. I applaud that you were able to do that and I hope that you have forgiven yourself for doing that by now because it doesn’t fucking matter that you missed some news. I can fill you in: it was bad [laughter]. KL I think that’s the thing too, like you realize that it’s this cycle of panicking and just being like, “Fuck does it matter?” And then being like, “Well, wait, there are things in my life that I know it matter for or to,” and then realizing like that you need to prioritize and maybe prioritize for other beings or people in your life and then being like, “OK, it’s going to be fine.” And then maybe it starts all over again when things get rough. JL And I think that’s a great point and in terms of forgiving myself now it’s like, “OK, well, let’s podcast. Let’s talk to people. Let’s get out there.” What else can I — what can I do next on things? So it’s not always, “Well, just because I didn’t do anything in 2017 doesn’t mean I can’t do anything in 2018.” So I think it’s that whole like terrible cliche about tomorrow’s another day in here. SWB What I also think a lot about is that gluing yourself to a news stream and going through cycles of freaking out is also not doing anything. That is not actually doing anything. And it’s not to say that there’s something wrong with being informed, but I do know what it’s like to sort of reflexively refresh to figure out like what new fresh hell has unleashed. And what I realized of course is the biggest things that I did last year was, like, I raised a bunch of money for abortion access. I donated a tremendous number of hours to Fair Districts PA, which is working on stopping gerrymandering in this state, and there’s significant progress on that, like we’ve just recently, in Pennsylvania, won this lawsuit against the districts that were drawn last time, which are super gerrymandered. And I was a direct part of the team that worked on digital strategy, and made sure they actually had a brand, I mean I did all of this hands-on work. And then, those don’t do anything to stop Donald Trump. Right? Like in this sort of like — in some of these macro ways that you know things are screwed up, I didn’t necessarily affect those things, but those are really tangible things that I did that are important, and that are important to human people who live in the communities that I care about. And like I was able to that because I had some and energy and expertise to give. And maybe this year you’ll have a little bit of time, or expertise, or energy to give to something you care about, but you gave a lot of time, energy, and expertise to birthing a child last year. 10:45 KL I mean: props [music fades in]. SWB [Music fades out][ad spot] Hey Jenn, do you know what always works during difficult times? JL What, Sara? SWB WordPress.com! So, WordPress.com is one of our wonderful sponsors, and we are so happy to be supported by them. Whether you would like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on WordPress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. And, you know, you don’t need any experience setting up a website. WordPress will guide you through the process from start to finish, and they take care of the technical side. In fact, we use WordPress here at No, You Go, and we never worry that we’re going to get hung up on a question, because WordPress has 24/7 customer support, and it’s great because we are all working on different schedules, trying to get our side project up and running. Plans at WordPress start at just four dollars a month. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo to get 15 percent off your website today. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo. JL You know what else has always been super reliable for me? Our other sponsor: CodePen. CodePen is a social development environment for front-end developers and designers. Ever want a place where you could write and share front-end code with others? Maybe even a potential employer? Your profile on CodePen is like your front-end development portfolio. I’m working in CodePen at least ten times a week. I love it. And if you’re ready for even more more CodePen, be sure to check out CodePen Pro. With a pro account you can upload assets like images to use in your code, you can create private pens — I have so many of those! And you can even see changes as you build with live view. Not to mention there’s a cool professor mode for teaching and working real time with your students. Pro accounts start at just nine bucks a month. Learn more at codepen.io, that’s c-o-d-e-p-e-n dot i-o [music fades in]. KL [Music fades out] Allison Crimmins is an environmental scientist working in Washington, DC. Along with her day job in climate science, she works on ambitious side projects like an early stage thriving biotech startup — no big deal! And volunteers to help encourage young folks to engage in STEM. She also happens to be one of my very close friends and every time I talk to her I feel either inspired, or assured, or pumped about something, and sometimes all of the above. Allison, I am so happy to have you on the show today. Welcome to No, You Go. Allison Crimmins Thank you! I’m very happy to be here. KL First can you tell us a little bit about your work or your area of expertise? AC I am a climate scientist with a background in oceanography but I also have a degree in public policy. So I’m in this kind of interesting place where my job involves some kind of wonky, nerdy climate science but also thinking about how that applies to policies, and thinking about ways to communicate that science to all sorts of different audiences, from policy-makers, state and local decision-makers, or just general members of the public. Yeah I really enjoy the sort of some science, some policy, some communications. I like that I get to do a piece of that everyday in my job. SWB Can you tell me a little more like what does that look like on a day-to-day level? AC Yeah, like my average Tuesday? [Laughter] SWB Yeah. AC So I have ongoing research projects that look at the impacts of climate change, specifically how they affect human health, and, in some cases, how they affect our economy. And so I help manage different research projects that publish peer-reviewed papers that go into wonky scientific journals and that’s kind of the science side of my job. The other side of my job would be making sure that that science actually gets applied and also communicated. The taxpayers pay for that science, and so they have a right to see it and know about and learn from it. KL So we know this is kind of a difficult time for people who do what you do, sort of generally, how are you? In this job? In this environment? Right now? [14:50] AC Yeah I get asked that a lot nowadays. Or if I meet someone new and I tell them that I’m a climate scientist, I usually get a, “Ooh, thank you for your service.” Which is — it’s actually been kind of nice that people have been coming out of the woodwork to actually let us know how much they appreciate the work we do. It’s hard to do good science and then not see it get used or be appreciated as much as it once was. But it doesn’t stop us from doing the good science. In fact, in a lot of ways it inspires us to work even harder. It’s kind of proof that what we’re doing is really important. KL How do you stay motivated or focused or even sane through all of this? AC Well, I guess it’s probably important to admit first off the bat that I don’t handle it every day with the utmost grace and aplomb. I’m an average person in a lot of ways, and so I have good days and bad days. But there’s always that driving factor that I’m doing good science and I’m helping to make the world a better place, and I’m surrounded by lots of people who feel that same way and have that same goal. And so in a lot of ways it’s the people I work with that have really helped me keep going every day and keep pushing through. KL Have you and the people you work with had to redefine things like progress or success in the initiatives that you’re trying to get through or the projects you’re trying to push out the door? AC I think by necessity you have to. I mean, I’m a civil servant. I work with a lot of other civil servants. You know you think about administrations shifting and you think that might cause a huge upheaval of the people that work there, but really the government is made up of mostly civil servants like myself who through whatever administration comes through will keep doing the good work and the good science and making sure that our country’s moving forward. So, you know, for people who have been there for decades, a lot of those people see this as just an inevitable shift in the political winds but not really altering their mission, or their long term goals. I think it’s harder for people who are newer in government to have such a severe shift, I guess, from the last administration to this one, especially in terms of climate change because in the last administration it wasn’t just that we had an administration that was pro-science, it was actually that we had a hunger and an actual request for more information to better understand the impacts of climate change. So we’ve had to, you know, we’re still doing the good work, we’re still doing good science. That’s still happening. We just have to be more strategic or creative in some places about how we accomplish those goals. SWB Yeah, what does that mean? So when you say getting strategic or creative, like, what kinds of techniques are you using day-to-day to feel like you can still make some incremental progress or get things communicated in a way that gets adoption, or in some way feel like you’re still moving toward those goals? AC Yeah, I think I’ll start by telling you a story that my father-in-law told me. He was in advertising for many years and he told us that oftentimes you’re able to be more creative when you’re forced into a situation with lots of limitations or restraints. So in his case, you know, he would be working on a commercial for a product and suddenly the company would say, “Well, we don’t want any people in this commercial, and it has to be this long, and you can’t say these words.” And they’d set up a bunch of limitations which can feel very confining and frustrating but it’s in those situations where I think anyone can be even more creative. It forces you to be creative. And I think about that story often in my day-to-day job when I am faced with maybe the normal way we would do something is now off the table. You can look at that with frustration or you can look at it as an opportunity to be even more creative. So in this time I’ve, you know, I guess to get more specific I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about other people or other groups that I can collaborate and maybe I can do the science but they can do the communicating. Or maybe I can connect to researchers who haven’t worked together in the past and one has the data and one has the model and, you know, maybe there’s a way I can put those two together and I don’t need to have my name on it but that science still moves forward. It forces you to really, I don’t know, get sneaky and strategic about how to keep this science progressing. [19:58] SWB In some ways it clarified what’s really important here. You’ve been able to say, “OK, it’s really important that the science keeps happening even if your name is not on the paper,” which I think is kind of hard though, right? Like if you’re somebody who has a lot of career ambition and is doing this work, is it ever difficult to feel like you can’t be as recognized for the work that you’re doing? Or as valued for that work? AC I mean that’s always hard if you’re not appreciated for the work that you’re doing. But in this case I think I don’t mind it so much. I’m happy to actually see information get out to people even if my name is not attached to it. And even kind of bigger picture: if I’m successful in my life-long career of addressing climate change, no one will have heard of my name because climate change won’t be an issue anymore that we’ll be dealing with. It’s kind of that counterfactual element of my job is, you know, we don’t talk about the ozone hole as much as we did, or when was the last time you heard about acid rain? If I’m truly successful at my job, you won’t ever know it. KL Has doing this kind of work, even in the last five years, the way that you’ve had to shift or change approaches, has that made you learn anything about yourself that you weren’t expecting? AC Something I’ve learned about myself is that, you know, when I first started this job I was moving kind of out of what we call bench science. So I wasn’t working in a laboratory anymore, working at a lab bench doing sort of the wet lab-type science, I was doing more work to apply that science. And when I first started my job and maybe I would work with a contractor or another researcher and I would look at the work they were doing and I would almost be jealous of it and think, “Well, that’s where I should be. I should be the person in the lab doing that experiment.” But over time I came to really appreciate sort of the project management aspect of my job, that I can guide the research and be sort of the big thinker behind coming up with new research questions and connect researchers together and in some ways it feels a little bit like I’m able to conduct more of the orchestra rather than play one instrument. KL Mm hmm. AC And that’s something I never thought growing up. I was the kid with the “Save the Whales” poster on their wall, you know? [KL laughs] From an early age, I thought I was going to be the, you know, that girl out on the boat saving the whales. But I actually feel a lot more powerful in the position I’m in now that I can help the larger movement of science progress. KL Right, you’ve sort of felt out all of the places you’re strong and you’re using those skills to do it like more holistically. You’re also the director of strategy for Remedy Plan, the biotech startup that I mentioned in our intro. Can you tell us a little bit about it? AC Sure. This is a startup company that my husband has started that does cancer research and it also kind of started out of two researchers coming together to discuss their … seemingly separate fields and finding a very interesting overlap and coming up with a really, really great idea of a new way to find cancer therapeutics. And so when my husband was first dreaming this up, you know, he’s on this very rigid academic traintracks. You know? You go and you get your PhD and you get your post doc and you follow this exact pathway and suddenly he had an idea that was like too good to pass up. It really was. And when he explained it to me, I instantly recognized it as too good of an idea to pass up. And so he quit his job and started this company, and we’ve been going for two years now and the science is going great [chuckles]. It’s interesting to be working on climate change during the day and cancer research on the weekends — KL It’s not, you know, it sounds totally laid back. SWB Does it ever feel just like a lot? Because it sounds like a lot when you describe it. AC It is a lot, yeah. I mean I don’t work full-time, of course, for Remedy Plan, but I try to help out where I can and it’s a pretty small startup, so, you know, the few people working there end up wearing a lot of different hats. But also both my husband and I are scientists and so all our training comes from science and we’re being forced to learn a lot of new skills. Like how to write a business plan, or thinking strategically about our branding and our website, or how does one even go about pitching potential investors for a Series A round? So it’s also kind of exciting and in much of the same way I love science because it’s an act of discovery, this side project has also been a really fun act of discovery for me, kind of exploring this whole other world. [25:16] KL That’s so cool, and also, I mean, I just want to say that you are incredibly good at communicating complex scientific concepts, you know, sort of real talk here: a lot of scientists aren’t always good at this, and it’s like, why is that, do you think? AC Yes. I don’t think a lot of people go through school or go through their PhD with any pressure or any element to explain what they’re doing to anyone else besides their immediate colleagues who understand the same language. And I hope that that is something that is changing. I think the other element is that scientists are wary to talk about their science in what they might view as a more simplistic or a way that could be misinterpreted which is unfortunate because I think if you really understand your work and your science, then you should be able to explain it to anyone. And I think, especially for my field of science, I think you have a responsibility to explain it to other people. KL Absolutely! I mean how did you get good at it? AC I think probably just because I’m really geeky about it and I like to talk about it a lot. And I want other people to be as excited as I am at these discoveries and so it’s something that I’ve always enjoyed doing. SWB I’ve met lots of scientists over the years. Actually both my mother and my brother are chemistry professors. They’re all geeky about their science, right? It’s not like any of them are not geeky about it, they all love talking about it. But what they don’t all love to do is come to you with it, they want you to come to them, right? So it’s like they want to talk about it on their terms because that’s what they’re comfortable with. And it sounds like something you’re really comfortable with is being able to bring things to other people and have a little bit more of that collaborative spirit, which to me seems kind of crucial to being able to communicate it in a way that’s going to work for different audiences. AC Absolutely, and I think even going back to, you know, the story of Remedy Plan. It came out of two people in slightly different fields who were able to communicate how exciting the thing was that they were working on and then see where those things overlap and provide an opportunity for something greater than the sum of its parts. KL So I gotta ask this: women make up half of the total college-educated workforce but only 29 percent of the science and engineering workforce. How have you navigated that? AC Yeah it’s a really tough field to be a woman. I mean a lot of fields are. This one’s definitely tough and at every step of the way, from undergraduate and grad school and post docs and jobs, we struggle and it’s hard, especially because we don’t have a lot of role models to look at, or we haven’t so far. Hopefully that’s changing. And often the role models we do have are those super amazing, you know, titanium women who can do it all. And it’s like, well, do you have to be made of titanium? I mean, can you just be someone who’s really into science and curious about life to enjoy being a scientist? So I got some advice early on in my career from a very wonderful female scientist who said to be wary of the people who are maybe hierarchically a little higher than you, and to be extremely giving and helpful to the people who are coming up behind you. And so I try as much as I can to talk with college kids or high school kids and most of the time my message is just, “Hi, I’m a scientist and I also happen to be a woman.” It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that. That I think when I first started going into classrooms, the teachers would have the kids draw a picture. Before I got there they’d have the kids draw a picture of a scientist and the kids would, of course, draw a man in a white lab coat with crazy hair and glasses. Like to a kid that’s our image of what a scientist is: this like wacky guy pouring chemicals from one jar to another. You know and then they introduce me and here I’m just kind of a normal lady coming into the room to talk about the fact that being a scientist let me travel to the Great Barrier Reef and explore these new lands, and make exciting discoveries, and I think just actually being seen is important. So I try to make that a part of my life as well to help when things get tough. [30:00] SWB Yeah I love that. It reminds me of this interview we did for an earlier episode with Elizabeth Fiedler, who’s running for the Pennsylvania Legislature. And she talks about how she has gone to campaign events with her baby strapped to her and on the one hand she — you know her children are extremely central to her life, and they’re also central to her campaign, to the issues that she cares about, and they’re present. And she wants people to see them there, right? But on the other hand she doesn’t want to hang out and be the baby candidate. She is there to talk about specific issues and it’s kind of this idea of like normalizing it, right? “Yeah, yes, I’m a mom. That’s great. That’s important to me. It’s very obvious. And then also let’s talk about the issues that we’re here to talk about, and let’s talk about what we’re going to do in this community.” And it’s kind of that same idea, right? It’s like, “Yeah, yup, I’m a woman. I’m here. And that’s extremely normal. And let’s talk about the science.” AC Absolutely. I mean there’s also times where I’ve had to be, or I try to be, more direct. I’ve been asked to speak on panels and blatantly told, you know, they’re so thankful I said yes because I’m the only woman on the panel. So when I am in those situations, or even when I’m sitting, watching a panel, I try to actually note out loud, “Hey, [chuckles] there’s no women on that panel.” A couple of weeks ago some colleagues and I were coming up with a list of people we wanted to reach out to review something we were working on and we came up with a list of ten names and not one name was a woman, and so I was like, “Hey guys, can we think of a few women?” And it was like — it’s not that the people I was working with were purposely not choosing women, they didn’t even recognize it until it’s said out loud. So, I think, sometimes just kind of shining a light on it in hopefully not too pushy of a way but just, you know, noting that this is the state of affairs helps, again, draw attention to the fact. SWB Yeah, like you don’t realize your own biases around what you think of as a default human and are until you can kind of take a step back. In tech, all the time, we have these conversations about representation and I remember this one time when I was being invited to speak at a conference and I was not available to speak during those days and so I declined. And he replied to me kind of exasperated and upset and what he told me was that I was the ninth woman that he’d asked to turn him down. KL You’re like, “Uh huh?” SWB And I was like — and then he was basically complaining that he couldn’t find any women who would speak at his conference. And I’m like, OK, first up: do not tell people that you’re the ninth person that you went to. Thanks for that. But second: it’s like, OK well you’re asking me really late, the conference was far away and it was only a few weeks out or maybe a month out or something and it was going to require, like, an eight-hour plane flight. And, you maybe haven’t done enough work to have women in your network who know you are, who trust you, who can talk to other women about whether your event is a good place for them, who you know et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like, why are you upset that women are turning you down instead of wondering, ‘Huh, what is about my event that is making it not a desirable opportunity for them?’ Look internally, bud.” Um but I’m not sure he actually did that. KL Well I am really glad that you are being seen and that you are on those panels and the author of these papers and I’m just really glad that you are. You’re such a great role model and you’re a really amazing motivator. Is there anything that you tell people, especially younger folks who are entering this field or trying to find their path? AC You don’t need to be some super nerdy genius to be a scientist. And, you know, of course, we have this persona in our society that that’s what a scientist looks like, that they’re some socially inept, weirdo, kooky nerd. Or that they are just an absolute genius at math. And I try to let them know that you don’t have to be any of those things. You know, I got a D in my seventh grade science class. But what you do need is curiosity, and if you’re curious and you like to explore and you like to discover, if you have those traits, that’s what makes a good scientist. I mean, I was a huge Indiana Jones fan as a little kid and, I know from the outside it probably looks like I’m sitting in a cubicle, working on an Excel spreadsheet, but I am like parting cobwebs from ancient stone ruins and finding hidden caves and using this decoder ring to find the treasure. That’s how I view science: as this very exciting opportunity to discover new things. So I feel like a lot of people, or especially kids, I think they don’t see themselves as a scientist if they’re not, you know, getting straight As in math. Or if they’re not a whiz at science class in school. But it only takes curiosity to be good at science. [35:24] SWB I totally want to dig into this a little bit more because I think we hear that kind of thing a lot about certain fields, anything related to science and technology too. We hear that about programming, right? That like in order to be a programmer you have to be this socially awkward person, usually a dude, and you work by yourself until the middle of the night, hacking away at something, and you had to start coding when you were 11, and all of these things that are really unachievable for a lot of people, or just not realistic, or that are just very alienating, and I think particularly alienating to girls who, no matter what they do, never fit that particular mold. Right? Like they’re never going to look like the kooky guy in the lab coat. And so I think that it creates all of these weird boundaries and this sort of like mysticism around science and technology as if it’s something that normal people can’t do or don’t do. And I think that’s the kind of thing that I want to push back on all the time because most of science is just normal people doing work. And that work is interesting and that work is powerful, but you don’t have to be special to do that. AC Absolutely, and it’s that sort of image that kids are forming in their mind when they’re young, that “scientists are not me.” They’re someone other. That they’re this, you know, other kind of human being with these other skills, and none of those skills happen to be social skills, that does science. And when those kids grow up to be adults that’s a really pernicious feeling to have. That scientists are other people and that also makes science feel like something that’s not approachable, that’s not being done with good interest at heart. It makes it into that sort of creepy, mad scientist. And that hurts us and we see that, of course, with climate change. We see that there’s this distrust of science, and distrust of scientists, and even just a distrust of people who are experts. And so that sort of stereotyping even when you’re young I think leads to pretty big problems for the advancement of science when those kids grow up. SWB Yeah, yeah, absolutely and I think back too to like the conversation about, you know, having kids draw scientists when they’re little. It’s like, man, not only are they all drawing a guy, but I bet you none of them drew a black scientist. Right? Like it sort of perpetuates this cycle where it’s like we just see the same stuff over and over again and you think about something like environmental science and something I think really immediately about is the way that climate change definitely affects, you know, people in poverty than people who have means. And it’s likely to affect communities of color and the idea of having like lack of representation in science from those communities that are likely to be really affected. Seems like such a massive problem. AC Absolutely, and I think it’s exciting to see the environmental justice gaining more legs and I think there’s a lot more work that needs to be done. You kind of can’t separate environmental damages from the justice movement. So it’s a super important topic and I hope that — you know, maybe science isn’t your thing. Maybe you are a genius graphic designer or, you know, you want to work on, you know, social justice issues. There’s still all sorts of opportunities in the scientific field for people like that to make the world a better place. SWB Would you be able to talk a little bit about the environmental justice movement, for those listeners who aren’t familiar with that term? AC Environmental justice is basically just the idea that we need to treat people in a fair way in whether that’s their race or their color or how much money they make or the type of place they live. Those people should all be involved in environmental laws or environmental policies and it’s really important to have all those different groups sitting at the table, thinking about how to improve our environment moving forward, and it’s an unfortunate fact that, of course, when there are thing that harm our environment, they harm the most vulnerable people in our society. So when someone’s building a power plant that’s going to have emissions that give kids asthma they’re often building it in a, you know, not in the backyards of people who are wealthy but in the backyards of people who are already facing a lot of environmental struggles, or a lot of existing health struggles. And so when we’re thinking about how to improve our environment going forward, you can’t think of that in a vacuum. You can’t think about it without considering social justice issues and getting those people who are affected by the inequalities in our society, they have to be at the table for those sorts of decisions. [40:37] SWB Yes! Like this totally dovetails with so many of the other conversations we’ve been having around different subjects but it all comes down to the same thing, right? Like you can’t have a really narrow slice of the population making decisions that affect everybody else — AC Yup, absolutely. SWB And that’s kind of what we’ve had for a long time. AC I mean in my work I spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of climate change on human health. And you can talk about the impacts on extreme summer temperatures or Lyme Disease or air quality issues or water quality issues, but time and time again it’s those vulnerable populations who are most affected by these impacts. So it’s the elderly population, it’s the children, it’s people with low socioeconomic status, or tribal groups, it’s people with preexisting health conditions or disabilities. And so it’s important that any action that we’re taking to improve our environment involves those people. KL So I mean between your day job and Remedy Plan and all these things that you’re doing, you work on a lot and you give yourself to a lot of this work that is really passionate. What are you doing that helps refill your energy jar? AC This week the Winter Olympics are starting, and I’m a big Olympics nerd. And I also find that the Olympics completely like reignite my faith in humanity like, “Wow, all these countries can still come together over sportsmanship!” You know it gives you a little bit of faith that — KL Yeah. AC The human spirit can solve these problems. KL Like we just have to try. We just have to show up and try. AC If we can all come together over bobsledding and curling, we can come together over climate change [music fades in]. JL One of the things I really loved about Allison’s interview is when she said what you need is curiosity. I think that’s so important, especially when we talk about getting more people interested in STEM and the work that I’ve done with Girl Develop It and this idea, lots of times, we don’t necessarily think of ourselves, “Oh well, you have to be a math nerd to do something.” It’s so important to think like, “No, what you need is curiosity to see if this something that appeals to you once you start doing it.” So I love these things that’s like let’s find out more about it to see if does appeal to me, not just assume it doesn’t apply to me. SWB Yeah, you know I think about this a lot because having my mom be a scientist, I think I grew up with this understanding that like that’s what a scientist looked like, right? And it was my mom and she wasn’t always wearing a lab coat and she wasn’t even particularly nerdy looking. She’s pretty cool. And I thought of that as being pretty normal and it took me actually a long time to realize other people did not see that as normal, that like people were like, “Oh you’re from that weird smart family.” And granted not everybody’s going to be a scientist, by any means, I mean it’s not for everybody. But to really normalize that as something that, like, people can do, women can do, people from different backgrounds can do, like that whole conversation about going in and having people draw a scientist and I think like, “Yeah, nobody would’ve drawn my mom.” Like, I would have drawn my mom. Representation matters a lot and having people understand at an early age, like be able to see themselves in something. I think that’s huge. I’m so glad that Allison talked about that and talked about sort of also the social justice and racial justice parts of environmental science, because I think that we don’t talk about that nearly enough or talk about it in those really human terms. KL If more people like her can do this work and be as articulate about what she does and how she does it and why it’s so important and why it’s so important for other young girls to get into it, I mean it’s like a no brainer. [44:28] SWB OK this totally brings me to what I want to talk about for the Fuck Yeah of the Week. KL OK. SWB Can we have a Fuck Yeah now? Is it time? KL Yes. JL I could use a little Fuck Yeah! SWB So our Fuck Yeah this week is the new Obama portraits, which we have been ogling over. So one of the things that I love that about them, and we’re going to get into some of the other stuff we love about them, but one of the things I love about them is that they’re such a powerful reminder, even during this time when things are difficult, even during this time when it feels like we are going backwards on a lot of issues, that we are still seeing amazing movement on representation of diverse people and specifically black people in all kinds of culture, including art. I mean obviously black people have been making amazing art forever. That’s not new. But what I think we’re starting to see more of is black art showing up in more prominent places and getting more attention. I’m paying attention to things like huge book deals that black writers are getting or, you know, Get Out last year and then this year we’ve got Black Panther coming out. And I think it’s so important to note that that is huge and that is big and that matters. And that that kind of representation, like we talked about with Allison, right? Representation of who a scientist can be, representation of like who is depicted in art and what are they doing. Like, it’s so important and I want to say a big Fuck Yeah to that. JL Yeah, there was a great quote from Michelle Obama and she said, “I’m thinking about all the young people, particularly girls and girls of color, who in years ahead will come to this place, and they will look up, and they will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the wall.” And so, you know, just like we talked about with Allison, the scientist, I just think the more that people see other people in these roles, the more that it becomes feasible to be them. SWB One of the other things that I loved about Michelle’s portrait, in specific, is that Amy Sherald, the artist, painted her in a sleeveless dress. I dunno if you all remember but in 2009 Michelle was criticized, I guess is the kindest way I could put it, but I would say that she was shat upon by conservatives for having her first White House official portrait be in a sleeveless dress. She was wearing this very classic black sheath with pearls, she looked great, but she was treated like she had done something wildly inappropriate. That, you know, of course it’s like somehow too revealing, too slutty, I don’t know, it makes no sense because arms — arms are fine. We all have arms. I’ve seen lots of arms. It’s OK, everybody. But it was just one of these ways that we could see the Obamas being treated differently than other candidates or presidents would’ve been treated and being treated in a way that was designed to make them seem like they weren’t credible or they didn’t belong there or whatever. But here we have Michelle in this sleeveless gown, looking amazing, but also just kind of giving her own fuck you to everybody who called her out for that because now that gets to be in the National Portrait Gallery forever. KL I love that. Also I was so struck by the portrait of Barack Obama. And I just I saw this tweet that Brittany Packnett had written and I thought the exactly same thing. I mean, she says, “Can we talk about how stunningly powerful it is to see a black man in a garden the way Kehinde Wiley painted Barack Obama? It dismantles so much and creates new visions of masculinity that black men rarely have the public permission to explore.” That is amazing. It’s so — I just feel like if that doesn’t resonate with you … SWB Yeah, I mean you know one of the things I noticed right away was like, “Oh yeah, have I seen ever a painting of black man in a garden in that way?” KL Right. SWB It’s like, no, you know, I’ve seen a thousand pictures of white people in, like, you know, impressionist paintings, or romantic paintings, like strolling in gardens with the little umbrellas or whatever. But I have definitely never seen a black person depicted that way. When you start paying attention to who are you seeing and then also like what roles are you seeing them in, I think that it helps you be much more aware of just how many gaps there are in how people are represented, and I’m so excited to see this kind of representation, and, you know, it’s not to say like that we’re saying like, “Oh we need to go back in time.” Or we’re trying to live in the past. It’s not about that. It’s about like what does that mean for our future to be able to have this on the wall and have kids go to a museum and see it? [48:54] KL So I think we can say that is a for sure Fuck Yeah for amazing paintings, for black artists, and for just representation that moves us forward in even the tryingest of times. SWB Fuck yeah! KL Fuck yeah. That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Allison Crimmins for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts. Your support helps us spread the word. We’ll be back next week with another great guest [music fades in and ramps up to end].

On Episode 5, we cure our political fatigue with an interview with Elizabeth Fiedler, a progressive Democrat running for a seat in the PA House. We also chat about wage equity laws, salary negotiations, and why you—yes, you—should run for office. If you’re anything like us, you’re tired as hell of what’s happening in politics: corruption, sexism, and misogyny are on full display. Immigrants are under attack, reproductive rights are under attack, environmental protections are under attack. The list could go on. But despite it all, we’re not about to sit and sulk. Instead, we want to talk about the legislation and candidates we’re excited about—because we could all use some hope right now. > So many of us are held back just by that feeling that like, “Hmm, maybe there’s someone else out there who is more qualified. Maybe there’s someone else who would be better at this.” And in some cases: sure, there is. In many cases, there is not. It’s us! We’re the ones. > —Elizabeth Fiedler, Candidate for PA House District 184 Here’s what’s on the docket in Episode 5: Hey employers: pay up First up, we talk about one of our favorite topics: getting paid—fairly. Here in Philly, we’re upset about more delays on our first wage equity ordinance, which would bar prospective employers from asking about your past salary (which is one of the major ways employers justify continuing to underpay workers from marginalized groups). The law was supposed to take effect in January, but the Chamber of Commerce filed suit—again. Their first lawsuit, last summer, was thrown out for lack of evidence that it would harm businesses. But wage equity laws are coming. California’s went into effect in January, and a bunch more are cropping up all over. And when an economy the size of California makes a law, it tends to have a ripple effect. Now some big employers are announcing that they won’t ask for past pay info, either. While we’re on the topic of compensation, we also chat about how to negotiate those challenging money conversations—and how to avoid getting backed into a corner (or in Katel’s case, a phone booth) to accept an offer that’s not up to snuff. Elect. More. Women. Next on the show, we talk with Elizabeth Fiedler, a candidate in May’s primary for a seat in the PA House, representing the 184th District. That’s the heart of South Philly, where Sara and Jenn both live. Lizz took a break from knocking doors (literally—she is always out there knocking doors) to talk with us about her run. We cover: Showing up at campaign events with an infant strapped to your body. How much we need single-payer healthcare in Pennsylvania—and everywhere. Wearing blue blazers and real pants. Like, without stretch. How to know if you should run for office (hint: if you’re thinking about it, you probably should do it). We love Lizz. Here’s where to get all the deets on her campaign: Campaign website Facebook Twitter Seriously though: Let’s elect some women. After chatting with Lizz, we look at the stats for elected officials in Pennsylvania. It’s not great. We’re ranked 49th in the nation for having women in office. Here are the facts: Pennsylvania has never sent a woman to the US Senate. It’s never had a woman governor. We currently have ZERO women elected to the US House—out of 18 representatives! Only 19% of the Pennsylvania Legislature is made up of women. But good news: women all over are fed up, and a record number are running for office in 2018. Rebecca Traister had a great article about it in The Cut last month. Plus, we’re super excited about folks like Danica Roem, who won a seat in the Virginia Assembly last November, becoming the first openly transgender person to be elected to a state legislature. Finally, we talk about organizations dedicated to getting more women on the ballot, like Emily’s List and She Should Run. Know a woman who’d be great in office? You probably do. Tell her you think she should run. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript [Ad spot] Sara Wachter-Boettcher This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify. No, literally. Because so many of the coolest designers, writers, and developers that I know have all recently joined their team. Shopify’s mission is to make commerce better for everyone, and they’re hiring more awesome people—people like you!—to help. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team, and work on the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. Jenn Lukas Hey! Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. KL On today’s show we’re talking about politics, and why it’s so important to have representatives that, well, represent us. We’ll also be joined by Elizabeth Fiedler who went from public radio reporter to candidate for the Pennsylvania legislature. Lizz took a break from knocking on doors and calling donors to tell us all about her life as a first-time political candidate, a mom, and a badass woman. But before we meet Lizz, let’s talk about just one of the many ways that professional is political: money. SWB Katel, Jenn, have you all heard the latest on Philly’s wage equity legislation? It was supposed to go into effect in January, but it’s been pushed back again because of lawsuits from the Chamber of Commerce. And I’m getting super frustrated by this, because I’ve been so excited to see it happen. The legislation is actually designed to prevent employers or prospective employers from asking you about your salary history when you’re in the interview process. And it’s meant to help close the pay gap by prevent people from kind of keeping salaries articifilally low. Right, because so often women and people of of color, and particularly women of color, go into these interview processes and are asked or demanded to share what their prior salary history was, and they end up unable to catch up to their peers, even when they change jobs. So this legislation is supposed to stop that. And it was signed like, a year ago, but it hasn’t been enacted yet because of these ongoing lawsuits. So at this point, I’m starting to get super frustrated. JL I think there was something similar in California. SWB Yeah so I was actually reading that there was some disappointment that Philly didn’t get to be the first in the nation to enact the law because the lawsuit slowed everything down. Because it was supposed to be first but California very quickly thereafter enacted very similar legislation that also ended up going into effect in January and what’s amazing about the California legislation is that, as you might be aware, California has kind of a massive economy and so so many big companies are headquartered there and that means that they hold a lot of sway over how business is done in general in this country. And so what we’re now seeing is all of these big companies, and especially tech companies, which I think is important to a lot of our listeners, are starting to change their policies whether or not somebody is in California. So I was just reading that Amazon has announced, for example, that it’s not going to ask people about salary history during the application process, no matter where it is that you might be working for Amazon because, you know, if you are starting to compete against companies that can’t ask those kinds of questions, it starts to make sense to kind of go with the flow. And so I hope a lot more companies go with this particular flow. JL Yeah, I love this. I mean it’s so often that we can caught in this trap, right? Where you start a job, whether it’s out of school or later on in your career, and you take the starting salary or what they’re offering you and then how do you build up from that? Right? So if people are constantly asking you what you do. I mean so it’s not even one: how do you get a raise at your own job? But then even if you’re leaving, how do you make a significant leap in pay if someone’s asking you what you’re currently making, even though you currently could be way underpaid for your skills and talent. KL It’s so problematic to think about because, you know, in my career — I feel like I’m, you know, pretty well established and I think back to points in time where I’ve tried to negotiate for a raise or make some kind of move with my pay and I feel like I’ve had that latitude. And I think about not feeling empowered to do that and being really trapped by just the last thing that was on your resume and, you know, just in your salary history — that just feels like such a — it’s like so blocking. JL Yeah. I mean you start a job and you’re working there and you work really hard and then, you know, you expect a raise to some extent but then what do you do once you’ve gone way beyond the capacity of your job? Right? And we have this problem where often we’re like, “Ok, well we’ll give you a percentage raise.” But three to six percent on top of your current salary, if it’s a low salary and not as justified for what you should be making, isn’t going to get you to where you need to be. And then sometimes I’ve seen companies — well it’s like, “Ok we’ll bump that up to ten percent.” But percentage-based raises are always really tough. And so then what do you do? I mean you start looking for another job, and then you’re looking for another job, and you’re still stuck. [5:10] SWB Yeah. I mean I remember earlier in my career getting trapped in these kinds of conversations where I would be going from — kind of, you know, individual contributor roles where I was responsible a pretty narrow slice of things to taking on more leadership, more strategic involvement in the organization, you know like being invited to more high-level meetings with clients, and also taking on management responsibilities. But because it was a smaller company and there wasn’t necessarily a clear path or progression, none of that was necessarily treated as if it was a promotion. And so what would happen is I would go into these reviews and I knew that I had been underpaid, I knew that I was being underpaid dramatically, but you go into the review and they’re like, “Well the number you’re asking for is a 25 percent raise and the standard we’re giving is, you know, five percent or something and we just can’t justify something like that.” And it’s like, “But where’s — how do I ever make up this gap?” And, you know, the thing about percentages, right, is that they’re based on the original number. So if you start a job and, I don’t know, maybe you make let’s say 50 thousand dollars a year and somebody starts the same job and they make 60 thousand dollars a year, their percentages are always going to add up to more money! And so even if somebody gives you a bigger percentage, it’s like you will typically end up further and further behind. And, you know, we’ve seen this happen so many times and it’s often to the people who are least likely to ask for pay adjustments and most likely to be judged harshly when they do which is [ahem] women. KL Yeah, I remember very vividly one of the first times I made a move to a higher position, I became a manager. I think I skipped a couple levels at that point in time. And I remember the moment where my boss was basically asking me to agree to the pay rate like in a moment between meetings. He literally was basically like, “Shake my hand. Here’s the amount.” Like, “You don’t even get a chance to say anything.” SWB Were you, like, in a fucking hallway? KL Yeah, no I’m not even kidding we had ducked into a room that was a phonebooth. And I was just like — I really regret that moment because, looking back on it, I wish I had said, you know, “No, wait. I deserve to take some time and think about this and come back to you with some questions.” But at that point in my career I felt like, “I need to take this. I need to make this move. And, great, it’s a little bit more money. Whatever.” SWB I wish our listeners could see my face because [laughter] what my face says is: “What’s his name? What’s his social security number? Let me look him up and have a conversation with him,” because I’m angry. JL It’s a great point, though, that it’s so hard in those moments to be like, “Hold on, wait, I need a second.” KL Exactly. JL But we should be able to say that. There is nothing wrong — I mean what’s the worst that could happen if someone’s going to say, “You know, I’m going to have to get back to you on that.” They’re not going to give you a raise anymore? SWB Well, I think that though — I would say that sometimes people’s fears are justified, not necessarily that the whole thing is going to be rescinded but that when you start asking questions, when you start advocating for yourself, like, sometimes people do react to that and not positively. And I think that that’s a sad reality that we’re trying to negotiate all the time. KL Yeah and I think as women there’s been situations where things have disappeared or been removed from the table and I feel that’s just a really real thing for us. JL I think for moments like that it’s important that we all sort of practice what happens if we’re in a situation like that. And I think for those fears where we are worried about that, which it definitely a justifiable fear, one of the things that I’ve done when I’ve felt uncomfortable is made sure to lead with: “Thank you so much for this offer! I’m so excited to be coming up with a new plan for us or a new partnership for us to work with. Let me just take this back and get back to you.” And sort of, you know, turn the ball where you’re thanking them, not saying that you have to but, again, if you’re playing that sort of defensive, “I need some time,” I think that’s sort of a way to be like: here’s how I can do this without fearing that I’m then causing animosity. SWB And I totally love what you’re saying, Jenn, about kind of practicing this stuff. In a similar vein, I have sat with friends of mine and talked through how much they were going to ask for in a negotiation and then I’ve been like, “Ok, have you ever said that number out loud?” And they’re like, “Oh! No!” [Laughter] I’m like, “No, ok, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to sit down and you’re going to say this number out loud to me over and over again until it stops sounding weird.” And I had a friend of mine who did that a couple years ago and she came back and not only did she, of course, get the job and get the money. She told me that it was really helpful to have said it until it didn’t sound odd and have said it until she was like, “Oh I can own this. I can own this dollar amount.” And … I think that’s hard to do but I think, like, it’s very helpful, I think, to do with a friend. It’s so great when you find somebody you can talk to about this stuff. I love — I love being able to talk to friends about this and being like, “Look, I don’t want to get weird about money. It can be touchy for people. But, you know, whatever the money is that you want to talk about, if you want to talk about it with me, I am so there for that and we can strategize and negotiate and practice until you’re ready to go into that meeting and be like, ‘Look, here’s how it’s going to be’.” [10:55] JL It’s really important to, I think, find either friends that you can talk to about that but I’ve even — Sarah, I’ve talked to you about this stuff before, so I definitely am taking you up on that. But, I mean, I’ve even done it, like, to my cat [laughter]. SWB Totally! Yeah. JL And sat there and just been there like, “Hey! What do you think about this, Azrael? Azrael, I would like to make 700 thousand dollars.” [Laughter.] KL My dog really understands [chuckles]. JL The other thing that’s really great is looking online at salaries near you. And I think that some of the resources that people have. I mean there’s been people that have started anonymous Google Docs Sheets and there are surveys about what people are making in the field. And I think that’s so helpful for getting an idea of the number that you can really feel comfortable with. I mean not all of us have people around us that are working in the same fields we are. So I think it’s really important to rely on the internet and other resources, if you don’t have someone near you that you can talk to about this. So I think it’s great that some of those are out there. And we should definitely link to some of those in the show notes. KL Yeah, that’s such a great point. Like, companies have to do market research to figure out what they’re going to pay people, so you should definitely do that as well. SWB It’s important to keep in mind that all of that secrecy around pay which companies will often really try to get you to have — it’s like, “Oh, don’t talk to people about salary, don’t talk to people about money,” that’s coming from a company because it’s in their best interests when people don’t talk about money. That doesn’t ever mean it’s in your best interest when people don’t talk about money. The reality is if you are working at a company that you do not have any ownership in and you are doing a job, you know, you have to be the person who’s going to advocate for yourself … I mean all of this strategizing, all of this practicing, all of this go get your friends to talk about salary with you — I think all of that is great and I’m glad that we’re all doing it but I’m so glad that we’re starting to see legislation that will actually support these kinds of things because, honestly, as much as it’s a good thing to be able to do given the circumstances, we all have better ways to spend our time than trying to talk to our cats about how much money we should be making. So I’m so glad to start to see some legislation and I hope that we can push for more legislation that helps with pay equity. You know, it’s been a long time coming [music fades in]. [Music fades out][ad spot] SWB We’re so happy to have wordpress.com as our sponsor on No, You Go again. Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on wordpress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. You know, we use WordPress here at No, You Go. It was the first place I went to build the site. And what’s great is that you don’t need experience setting up a website. WordPress can guide you through the whole thing from start to finish. They have great customer support. I know they have great customer support because I have asked them questions and they have answered my questions without me getting frustrated or upset. They’ve got that customer support seven days a week and they also have plans that start at only four dollars a month. With every single plan you can get a custom domain name for the entire life of the plan and they’re just great people. So if you go to wordpress.com/noyougo you can get 15 percent off your website. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo [music fades in]. Interview: Elizabeth Fiedler SWB Elizabeth Fiedler is a candidate in May’s Primary for a seat in the PA House, representing the 184th District, which is the part of South Philly where both Jenn and I live. I first heard about Lizz back in the summer of 2017 when our friend, Sekoia, told me about a super progressive woman that she had met through a local moms group. And she said she was considering running against a long-term incumbent who I wasn’t particularly excited about. So I was pretty intrigued and a bunch of us headed over to Lizz’s one night to hear more about her potential run. Since then Lizz has gone from pretty unknown to somebody who has posters with her name on them all up and down my street. Lizz, I’m so excited to talk with you right now, in the middle of your campaign. Welcome to No, You Go. Elizabeth Fiedler Thank you so much for having me. SWB So, first off, can you tell us a little bit about your platform. [15:00] EF Sure! I am always happy to talk about my platform. So, I am the mom of two little kids and that’s important for me to mention in the beginning because healthcare has actually really been a struggle for my family, accessing healthcare through the marketplace, CHIP, Medicaid — so it’s taken many more of my life hours than I expected. And I know a lot of other people are also struggling to access healthcare. That’s something I’ve heard from a lot of people across our district. And so that is one thing that is — one of the primary points of my platform is working toward a healthcare system in our fair state of Pennsylvania. A healthcare system that will work for all of us. So it’ll prioritize our lives over profits for corporations and over making the super rich richer. It would be similar to a single payer system: Medicare for all, these things that are discussed as ways that we can, as people, make sure that we have a healthcare system that prioritizes our health. SWB Yes! I mean I also have spent my fair share of time navigating the healthcare exchange, navigating getting insurance as a self-employed person, and it is so time consuming and so hard to figure out and so frustrating and that’s, for me, for somebody who has, so far, been a relatively low user of the system and also — I’m somebody who the system has kind of worked for … and it’s still a pain. And I know that I’m very lucky that it’s only been a pain and I’ve still been able to navigate it. EF Definitely. I actually recently just started … sort of sharing my own story about trying to get my two little kids covered on health insurance and I got this phone call and, this is after weeks and weeks of me submitting all of this documentation and calling them and saying, “Do you need anything else? I’ve got these two little kids. I need them on health insurance. I need them on health insurance.” And I got this phone call a few weeks ago and the woman said, “I’m really sorry to tell but neither of your kids have any health insurance right now. There’s a problem in the system, we had delays, they have nothing.” And so — and my kids are three and seven months — SWB Oh my god. Yeah. EF — and she said — and this is after I had submitted more paperwork than you can imagine [laughing]. Or maybe you can imagine. And she said, “If anything happens to either of them during this time, you can’t take them to the doctor. They can’t go to their regular pediatrician. You have to take them to the emergency room and you have to plead with the nurse on staff: ‘I have a child here who’s uninsured and who’s injured, can you please them?’” And I mean, my god, no parent should have to say that, no person should have to say that. It’s just appalling to me that we live in a country where that is part of our healthcare system where people are uninsured or underinsured and I just — I can’t — I feel very motivated to work toward a better healthcare system and so that’s always been — you know when I’m out there knocking on doors and talking to people that personal connection, and similar ones I’ve heard from so many people, that’s always on my mind. SWB It’s so shocking for what it is and then also just that this healthcare worker would explain that to you almost like it’s the most normal thing in the world. They’re so used to navigating this completely broken system that they’ll just walk you through all of these wild steps that you’re supposed to go through as if that’s — that’s just how it is! EF Yeah, absolutely. JL I can’t imagine as someone with an eleven-month-old and I feel like, for me, I’m calling all the time. So as a new parent, I’m constantly like, “Um, can you just check to make sure my baby’s ok?” And so to have to go from the opposite is yes, it makes my heart sink hearing that for you and for everyone that has to go through that. EF Healthcare also was one of the things that could’ve held me back from making that decision to run. So the job that I had before running provided healthcare. It wasn’t perfect but I had health insurance, it was pretty good and both my children were on it. And so my decision to run affected my family in some very significant ways, including the fact that we all lost our health insurance and had to go through the marketplace to get healthcare. My partner works for a small business and they don’t provide healthcare to dependents. So that was actually a very significant thing for me that I thought a lot about. My kids are on this healthcare, I’m on this healthcare through my work, do I really want to make this decision to run for office and, in some ways, give that up? Right? And I think that’s real for a lot of people: being tied to a job because of the way that our healthcare system in our society is structured and how much health insurance is tied to employment. SWB Yeah, absolutely, it gives employers a lot of leverage over people. EF It does and I think it keeps some people in jobs that they don’t necessarily want to be in, right? For what they think that they could earn more money somewhere else or would be more interested in a different career or could start a small business but they’re terrified of the leap it would take them to jump into an unknown healthcare situation. [19:55] SWB So you were weighing the decision to run, you were interested in doing it, you were dealing with healthcare, and you were thinking about that pretty heavily. What made you decide to go for it? EF Gosh, I thought a lot about it. I had a career as a journalist that I really loved and I had been working as a reporter for more than ten years and it was tremendous. I really had the chance to talk to a lot of people across our city in South Philly and it was a great job. And I realized that I needed to do more. I looked at the world that we live in and the world that I’m handing to my kids and we’re handing to future generations with healthcare and schools and climate change and I thought about the fact that, honestly, I’m pretty terrified about the direction a lot of those things are going in. It’s not the world that I want my kids and other generations to inherit and I just really decided I needed to do more. I couldn’t continue to do what I was doing. I was no longer as happy with it as I had been because I felt so compelled to act. And I would like to say that I was the one who came to that realization after careful reflection but I needed a little help getting there. It was actually my partner, we were driving — I don’t know — we almost never drive, I don’t even know where we were driving but I remember we were in the car side by side and I was talking about how — national politics and state politics and I’m so unhappy with what’s happening and I feel like I need to be more involved. And he said, “You know you want to run for office, right?” [Laughing] I think — I don’t know how long it was before I said anything but I hadn’t really thought of that. And I think that’s the case for a lot of people who have not been involved in politics. That’s certainly the case for a lot of women. It’s not a sphere that’s particularly welcoming to us, especially where we are geographically right now, it’s a place that’s dominated by men and by a male culture and I had just never imagined myself being that person, having my face on the literature. [Laughing] you know really — maybe I would work for someone. I had never thought specifically about stepping up and doing that. It’s a big jump, right? It can seem intimidating. It took my partner saying, “You know you want to do this, right?” For me to think about it and I was like, “Oh! You’re right! I do! I absolutely do. It’s exactly what I want to do. I want to have a firsthand impact in affecting and crafting policy. I want to be the one out there talking to people about what’s working for them, so that we can make government work better.” It was like he flipped a switch in my head and suddenly I was — you know, just hearing that from him I was able to see in myself that that’s exactly what I wanted to do. SWB That’s great. I love to hear that kind of level of ownership that you’re saying. Like, “I want this and I want to put myself out there and make that happen.” And I think you’re right, like women are frequently not taught to do that — to sort of say, you know, “I’m going to put myself in the center of this and I’m going to make this happen.” And that combined with a whole lot of other factors have made it really difficult to get women into office in Pennsylvania particularly. Something I’m super curious about that you started to mention here was what the local political climate is like. Not all of our listeners are in Pennsylvania, they may not realize that Philadelphia is known as kind of a Democratic machine. The city is almost entirely voting Democrat — pretty high numbers like 80 percent or so but it’s not necessarily progressive and it’s not necessarily the kind of scene that might seem welcoming to you. So can you tell me a little what that’s like: being a newcomer, trying to oust an incumbent in this particular area? EF Sure! So big picture, for people who don’t know, Pennsylvania is 49th in the nation in women in elected office. So that’s every level of elected office, Pennsylvania is second worst only to Mississippi in that stat. So we obviously have a very long way to go. It was quite intimidating in the beginning. The thing that has motivated me from the very, very beginning when I first started telling people I was doing this through us opening our campaign office last weekend was the response that I’ve gotten from people. I knew in the very beginning that I had very strong values, very strong desires of what sort of legislation I wanted to work toward, a strong reason for doing this, but I really did not know exactly how people would respond. And it has been so absolutely amazing. So people I know, people I see at the park, and then all these people who I knock on their door and I introduce myself and I say, “Hi, I’m here to meet you. I want to hear what’s important to you. What’s working in your life, what’s not working in your life, what would you like to see elected officials thinking about and government doing?” Honestly, the response that I’ve received from people has been really, really positive. It’s been: “Thank you for stepping up,” “Yes, oh my goodness! We need more women in elected office. We need more people who really have our interests in mind.” So those are the sorts of conversations that I work hard to remember when I am part of difficult situations and difficult discussions where I don’t necessarily feel particularly welcome. There were some people in the beginning who when I told them what I was doing, they were like, “Woah!!!” [Laughing] I mean I think they were pretty surprised because it is …yeah, you know, I’m a mom and a former journalist and someone who’s active with my local public school. I don’t have a lengthy insider political pedigree, I haven’t been thinking about this for decades, you know? I’m someone who’s stepping up because I really feel called to do it because I want a better health insurance system for all of us. Because I want all of us to have clean water and clean air. And so going back to those principles and those reasons that I’m running and thinking about specific people I’ve talked to and their struggles is how I get through some of those tougher times, honestly, when I don’t feel that welcome. [25:45] SWB Yeah, well I think I mean I’m so glad that you’re doing this because bit by bit when we have more women and more people from different backgrounds and people from new generations involved in what is a pretty uh homogenous political scene here. It gets easier for everybody else that follows and I’m so glad to see that happening. I’m really curious: you’ve mentioned being a mom a few times, obviously it’s very central to your life and it’s also central to your campaign, but what the hell is it like to have a seven-month-old and a three-year-old as you’re in the middle of this campaign? EF [Sighs] oh boy! Pretty good. Sleep is actually something I prioritize more than other things, more than folding laundry, more than — I don’t know, whatever the other — cleaning our house. I prioritize sleep because I know very personally, I’ve known this as long as I can remember, that without sleep I am much less, much less happy and much less useful in the world. It’s pretty tough for me sometimes at night to say, “Alright, it’s 10pm I’m going to bed,” when I look around and see all of the things that there are left to be done but I work hard to do that because I know it’s important for me and for me to be a good — not just a good mom but a good candidate, a good person, a good human being to interact with. So I try to think about myself and prioritize that. That said: it’s tough sometimes. I mean, I love my kids and sometimes, especially most of the weekend: Saturdays and Sundays, I’m usually gone. I’m usually out knocking doors, sometimes I have one meeting. But I’m usually gone, you know, 9am to 7pm is pretty consistent. 9am to 6pm, sometimes, if I get done early. So I have started to try to come back in the middle of the day just for a little bit. You know get some pre nap-time cuddles, some kisses, read a book to them, I sing my son “Jingle Bells,” it’s still his favorite song. [Laughing] so I try to get home in time for “Jingle Bells,” like things like that that are moments that are — it’s not as much time as I might, you know, in different world want to spend with them, but making sure that I have some time like that with them each day. So that I can think about it when I’m out there knocking doors and it’s freezing cold and my legs, honestly, are a little bit tired. Having those moments because I think without that balance I wouldn’t — it would be much harder for me to do it. I would also say that it’s amazing. It’s really amazing the response I’ve gotten from people. I’ve had people reach out to me who said, “Oh I’ve always — you know I’ve been thinking about running for office but I thought I couldn’t do it because, like you said, I have an eleven-month-old or because I’ve never been involved in politics or I’m pregnant,” or whatever their thing is, right? Sometimes related to kids, sometimes not. But often they’ll say, “Well, I saw you spoke to the Indivisible chapter and you had a five-month-old baby in the baby carrier on you and you were just doing it and you could see his little chubby legs hanging out there and I can do it too.” Like that was a message to me that like, “Oh I could absolutely do that if I want to. I could run for school board, I could run for commissioner.” So that’s really been fantastic and I’ve had people reach out to me who, you know, they like Facebook message me who I have never met [laughing], who I don’t know from across the state. So that’s honestly been inspiring for me to hear from them …and …I just try to remember why I’m doing this. And that’s what, you know, the moments when it’s hard and it’s time for me to go and I give them a kiss and my three-year-old says, “No, no, stay! Do a puzzle.” Um I remember that I got into this for a very specific reason because I really believe we should have elected officials on every level of government fighting for us as people for healthcare and education and water and air and that’s why I’m doing it. And then I give them an extra hug and kiss and tell them I love them and I’ll see them for dinner and then I leave. EF So, you know, there are some tough times. I’m very, very fortunate to have a wonderful, wonderful partner — SWB Yeah, so speaking of partner, how did you work out with him what that balance or that juggle, I guess, would look like? Like, how did you figure out how you would keep things running on a day to day level? EF Oh boy! Four months in, we’re still trying to figure that out! [Laughs.] SWB I mean, I guess, aren’t we all? But yours seems [laughing] particularly acute. [30:00] EF [Laughs] yeah. Always coming from a place of respect and both of us always remembering that if the other person did something wrong or did something differently from how we would’ve done it that it was not malicious. It was not intentional, most likely, it was just an effort to get that thing done. Right? So whether it’s like my son sometimes wearing uh his pajama pants to school or wearing his rain boots when it’s not raining. Or my youngest child wearing a sweater that doesn’t exactly fit — like something like that, right? Or like we’re eating spaghetti for the fourth day in a row, woohoo! You know things that I’m like, oh my goodness, us always remembering why we’re doing this. Why we’re doing this as a family and that we love each other and we respect each other and the other person is doing the best they can. It might not be perfect and it’s probably not going to be. And I also heard from a number of other women who are already in elected office in Pennsylvania and um … it was really great. It was good to hear from them, you know? Hear from them say like, “Yeah, it’s going to be tough. There are going to be times when you think like, ‘This might be too hard. I don’t know about this,’ but you just gotta keep pushing through. Just push through. Do your best. There are going to be moments when it’s messy and not perfect and that’s fine. Accept it. Don’t try to be perfect or have complete control of the situation. Sometimes um it’s ok if your kid eats pizza for lunch and dinner. That’s fine.” [Laughing] things like that that you know when you’re a parent you want to do your very best all the time and we all do, in life, right? You want to wear matching socks, things like that that like oh my goodness, in the scope of the world, it doesn’t matter, um that said: my socks are very much matching right now. I would like to say, for the record [laughs][laughter]. SWB Well, I mean, as a candidate you kind of having to go out with at least matching socks. I’m curious, did you have to buy a lot of blazers to run? EF So a lot of my clothes — this is — I don’t know if it’s of interest, it’s a personal thing but I would imagine some people have had a similar situation after having a child um a lot of clothes didn’t fit anymore. So I had a fair amount of stuff from working as a reporter for 11 years. I had the blazers and the dress pants but a lot of that didn’t fit or was not particularly comfortable. So I bought a few things on sale with the help of my mother-in-law who is very fashion savvy. I think I look pretty good. I try to wear colors. I tend to like grey and navy and black. But I’m working on it. I’m trying to wear color, trying to stand out. So I did it. I bought two blazers — SWB No, you’ve gotta be out there in the red and blue, right? EF [Laughs] I keep my two blazers in high rotation. SWB That would be tough for me to get used to, having to kind of always go out there and be like, “Ok, I’m going to put it together today and I’m going to project a certain kind of image and that image can’t be gym clothes.” EF Right. No stretchy pants, no athletic pants [laughter], no athleisure pants, none of that. No, no. SWB Oh man I feel like I should you know like pour a little out for the athleisure pants here, that’s so sad. We all like stretchy pants. JL I just try to leave the house without any cat hair on me and that is what I consider a win for the day. SWB Oh by that measure, I’m also losing. Damn. Ok. So something else that I’m really curious about is what candidate life has been like for you so far. Like is there anything that surprised you about being a candidate? EF Mmm. One thing that has surprised me that I’m really dedicated to working to improve after I win this race is just how hard it was in the beginning — it was difficult logistically. I guess I would say. Like some of these databases you need access to so you can see voters and like starting a pac and figuring out finances and things like that that are very specific things, there are solid answers to these questions but for people who don’t know — and I did not have a particular idea — they can seem daunting and overwhelming. Right? You think like, “Wait, do I start a PAC? Would a PAC be in my name? Would a pac be in someone else’s name? What money does a PAC spend? Does all money go through a PAC?” I mean things like that that like it sounds like it’s in the weeds kind of but it’s actually really integral to running a campaign and running it correctly but I think — I know from talking to a lot of people. Just stuff like that can feel so overwhelming in the beginning that you start to think, “Oh well maybe this isn’t for me. I don’t know how to do this stuff. I have no idea. I don’t even know where to start. I don’t even know — would I Google it? I don’t even know who to call.” Luckily, I personally knew a few people who had run campaigns before and I could ask for help and ended up hiring some really good people who know exactly what they’re doing and could help me with some of the nitty gritty stuff but I think we absolutely need to have systems, programs, organizations that help people with those details of running. Right? So help them come up with their platform, help them come up with their personal narrative and story, but also help them with some of this particular stuff that can feel so overwhelming in the beginning and, I think, can result, honestly, in a lot of people giving up and deciding it’s not for them. People who should absolutely run and would be great elected officials. SWB Yeah, yeah that overwhelm I think can be so easy [laughing] to sink into and never get back out of. EF Definitely. SWB So, kind of a similar line, was there anything you feel like you got good at in a hurry? Like any hidden talents that came out as you started running? [35:20] EF Talking more about my personal experience and my personal stake in this and why I’m doing it from a very personal level. I’m doing this, obviously, for larger reasons of social institutions and economics and social justice and racial justice. But I think it’s so important that elected officials explain to us what’s at stake for them, right? What’s driving them. Why are they so invested in this thing? And that’s something that can be even more difficult for women who are running for office, right? To appear vulnerable, to show that they’re vulnerable about some things because it can be scary, right? [Laughing] And it can be kind of brutal in politics and the instinct for many people is to close up and just start talking about, like, bill numbers and throwing around jargon. And I think it’s so important for elected officials to show that they are, whatever they’re motivating factor is, personally, whatever the thing is that they’ve been through that fuels them and wants them to go out from 9am to 7pm or whenever they’re doing it. I think it’s important … for people to know that. SWB Yeah! And, you know, one of the things I really like about this message of having to get a little bit vulnerable is that I think it’s also — it points towards sort of a different way politics could be and a different way elected officials could act, right? Like if everybody who was in office was willing to operate at that kind of human level and get real about what they’re doing, I think that we would see government very differently. There’s so much of this … ego and pomp that sort of gets involved that prevents people from being real and certainly there’s so much of that that’s like very gendered. And I think that, you know, if we had more women in office who were willing to get up and talk in that way, you know, I think that the — just like the overall tenor in how things would get done would change dramatically. EF Definitely. And I think that’s one that we can work, like in our situation in Pennsylvania — that’s one way in which we can work across a partisan divide and urban-rural divide — is to really show that humanity and focus on that humanness and our human needs, as opposed to some of these old divisions that exist and are real but that are often transcended by our needs as people. SWB So … speaking a little bit more about changing the ratio of women in politics in Pennsylvania, I’m curious what it’s like to run as a woman—a, you know, relatively young woman. I think you’re about the same age as we all are which is, you know, thirty-something-ish. EF I mean I would say one of the things is that I am — my kids sometimes come to things with me, especially my youngest when he was a little bit younger. So when I announced, Louis was three months old and so was still very much in the developmental stage of needing to eat more often, needing more physical contact, and so he was often in the baby carrier when I would show up at events, when I would show up at big meetings with people, and there were quite a few [laughing] instances when people were astonished that I was the candidate. That I had shown up with a child in tow and so normalizing that — I think it’s important. Period. And I think also as a matter of economic justice, I mean a lot of us can’t afford to have a babysitter to watch the kids all the time. A lot of us don’t want to necessarily do that all the time. So really like normalizing that, I guess, would be something that’s important and some people have been quite surprised and so for me it has been a lot about pushing past that. You know, noting it: yes, true, baby is here. Now let’s talk about the reason that we’re here: I would like to seek your endorsement. You know showing them that it is possible to be doing both things at the same time. That I’m still a person to be taken very seriously. That I still have a lot of experience and am very dedicated. SWB I love that because I think, yeah, it’s normal. People have babies. Like a lot of people have babies all the time and they’re still people with ideas and plans. And so I’m really glad you’re out there, you know, bringing your kids along and bringing them up regularly and making that so central to the campaign without also letting that be a distraction. It doesn’t turn into just talking about, “Oh my god it’s the candidate with the baby.” Right? It’s like, “We’re here to talk about issues. Also, my kids are very much part of my life.” EF Yeah, absolutely and that’s something that we’ve stressed with our campaign from the beginning in that — so when we have people going out to knock doors, we just had our office opening party, we have fundraisers, we always work as hard as we can to provide childcare. And that’s actually resulted in a lot of people, a lot of young — youngish parents — I call myself youngish — parents getting more involved in politics, getting more involved in our campaign than they have ever before. Because they didn’t get the message. You know? They didn’t feel like they were welcome, there was no childcare, what are they going to do about it? Approaching it from this perspective of, “Of course childcare is provided, and we would love you to come and knock doors with us from one to four,” has been hugely rewarding and is the way I want to conduct my campaign too. [40:35] SWB So speaking of your campaign, I’m curious too: who’s on your campaign team and how did you approach building out that team? EF In addition to myself there are three paid people on staff. We have a lot of super volunteers who are absolutely amazing. Our paid staff is all women: finance director, field director, and campaign manager … and they’re fantastic. I could not ask for a better group of people to be surrounding me. My campaign manager has been with me since the very beginning. She started as my field director and she’s worked in the last two election cycles, specifically down here. So she’s very experienced and she also lives down here in the district. And we spend a lot of time together. That was one thing someone told me in the beginning was like, “Make sure you like your campaign because you’re going to spend more time with them than you will with any other human being.” And that’s Amanda. And Katie is my field director. She worked as a super volunteer in the last election. Her candidate who won — and she’s the face of the campaign in many instances in the office. When a volunteer shows up in the office and says, “I’m here to volunteer,” they often see Katie. And my finance director is Gretchen and she organizes fundraisers and also helps me with what is called Call Time. Call Time is when it’s me, a phone, and a list of people who I’m going to call, and ask them to support my campaign financially. And uh I guess maybe that has been one thing that has been surprising for me is how strange, especially in the beginning, how strange it was to call people up and ask them for money. I mean, just saying that sentence, like I never in my life had done that before. Um calling people and asking them for money. So getting more used to that, getting more comfortable and thinking about why I was doing it, why I’m running. SWB Do you feel comfortable now when you call and ask for money? Has it shifted for you to now you’re like, “Ok, I can do this. No problem.” EF It’s gotten easier. It’s not always easy, it depends. The idea is that you create this long list of everyone you’ve ever encountered in your life and that includes people you haven’t talked to in ten, or 15, 20 years, you call those people and you tell them, with great excitement in your voice, “I am running for office!” And you tell them why and you hear from them and then you ask them for money … which is pretty strange if like you have not actually talked to them for 15 years and they’re just telling you about their life and their kids and you had no idea they had children and you didn’t know they lived in New Jersey. Things like that where it really feels a little — it doesn’t feel comfortable. I’ve gotten better at that and I’ve received, honestly, really, really amazing responses from people when I’ve asked them for financial support and that’s what made it easier. That and just doing it over and over. Someone who ran for office before told me [laughs], he said, “Call all of your exes and all the people you’re dreading calling.” And I was like, “Oh! I don’t want to do that.” And he was like, “Call all of those people because once you call those people and tell them about your campaign and ask them for money, you can call anyone! You won’t feel afraid at all.” SWB We are just about out of time so I want to ask just a couple final questions and the first one is do you have any advice that you would give to people who are from groups that are underrepresented in politics who are interested in running? EF If you’re thinking about it, you should run. SWB Just that? Period. You’re like, “Look, if you’re thinking about it that means you actually want to already.” EF Yes, absolutely, and people should think about what office, what level of government makes sense to them, for them, in their lives and given the kind of work that they want to do. But I really think so many of us are held back just by that feeling that like, “Hmm, maybe there’s someone else out there who is more qualified. Maybe there’s someone else who would be better at this.” And in some cases: sure, there is. In many cases, there is not. It’s us! We’re the ones. We’re thinking about it already. If you’re ready to do the hard work and you’re considering running for office and you hear, when you say it to other people, people are like, “Oh my gosh! You would be a really good candidate, of course!” Then you should run. You shouldn’t let any sort of hesitation like that hold you back because we need so many more people to run, so that we can have gender parity and so that we can have our ideals and our values represented too. SWB So last question: the Democratic primary is in May and a few minutes ago you said something about, “When I win,” so I love that and I’m curious how are you feeling at this point? Are you starting to get excited? [45:06] EF I feel good. It’s surprising to me that we are already so close to the election. Time has gone by both quickly and slowly but generally quite quickly, and I feel good. We have a lot of hard work to do before the election. That said, we have a really good team and I know that we are committed to making it happen. SWB Well, I feel good. I’m very excited. EF Thank you [music fades in]. JL [Music fades out] well, I loved that. There was so much that Lizz said in there that I could completely relate to. SWB Yeah, I bet. I mean like all of this balance and juggle of being a new mom and trying to do ambitious stuff. I mean it kind of is pretty similar to the stuff we’ve talked about already. JL Yeah, completely. And one of the things that I really loved that she touched on was that for their campaign fundraisers how they were providing childcare. So people could canvas and they’d watch their children and I’m constantly struggling with that. I’ve started digging into speaking at conferences again because I took a little bit of a hiatus while pregnant and then in the first 11 months that I’ve had Cooper and so now I’m trying to get back in and I’ve been talking at conferences but it’s hard to figure out what I’m going to do. There’s some conferences that provide childcare for both attendees and speakers which I just think is so cool and so great that people are thinking about these sort of things. SWB Yeah, I love that too. It’s — one of the things I always think about is that even if only a few people need the childcare, you know it doesn’t have to be a large percentage of people, it’s really meaningful to those people who use it and then to everybody else I feel like it’s also such a strong signal that this event is thinking about you as a person and that people have needs and that it’s ok, right? It’s ok if your needs are childcare, it’s ok if you need to ask for a meal with certain dietary restrictions — SWB — like those kinds of little details I think really tell your attendees or your audience a lot about your values and I’m always looking for that, even though I don’t have kids, right? If I see an event that has childcare, to me that’s a signal. JL Yeah, I spoke at and attended JS Confs back in the day and they used to have a Significant Other track. So that you could travel with your family and what they did is they would have like — if you were attending the conference, the Significant Other track would go and do tours of DC, where the conference was. And I just thought it was neat to provide something for that. So if you wanted to travel with your family, to have that there. KL That’s so cool and I feel like, thinking about potentially a conference organizer’s point of view, it’s like, why wouldn’t you want to be able to get as many people to your conference and include those people because of a variety of different things that they might need. So it just seems obvious, you know? JL I guess it’s hard though, right? I mean cuz it’s another cost. KL Oh for sure. JL And so I think it’s always like — yeah I mean I don’t know it’s hard — I can understand why people’s instinct wouldn’t be to think of it but I wish they would. KL Yeah, no, for sure. SWB Running events is hard. Running events is very challenging, running anything is challenging, but I think that what it really means is that there’s a lot of priorities that people have that they kind of perceive as being default, right? Like, ok, for example at a conference oftentimes the default priority is: we need to have an open bar at the party. And people don’t think twice about spending budget there but will think like, “Oh my god! I have to spend money on childcare!” And I think that that’s just a challenge to what the default priorities are. And once you — it doesn’t mean that every event is going to have a budget for everything but it does mean that if you can kind of like let go some of those assumptions then you come at it from sort of a fresh perspective and say, “Ok, what’s really going to create the kind of experience that we value and that sort of like lives out our values?” JL That’s so true and, you know, a lot of those open bars are sponsored by bigger companies. So maybe conferences need to work with sponsors, maybe sponsors want to sponsor childcare … and they should do this and whatever conference that is should talk to me about speaking there [laughter]. SWB Absolutely. KL Yes, yes. Good idea. SWB I mean, hell, you know especially in tech you’ve got all of these big tech companies that are like, “We need to show that we support women in technology. We need to have a more diverse perspective. We want people to see that we value this.” Sponsor some childcare instead of sponsoring booze! I enjoy drinking, don’t get me wrong — but I would much rather buy my own wine at the party and see them sponsor something that really matters. JL Quick thank you to our sponsors for being so supportive of our podcast. SWB Woohoo! Yeah! KL Yay! SWB So I want to go back to one other thing that Lizz talked about though and that was the representation of women in politics in Pennsylvania. So she mentioned that Pennsylvania’s 49th in the nation for how representative women are in elected office. So I looked into this and there are some kind of sobering stats about this. So, first off, Pennsylvania has never sent a woman to the US Senate. Did you know that? Never. Not once. [Wow][oof] We’ve never had a woman governor and right now did you know there are 18 representatives in the US House from Pennsylvania? So we have 18 reps, zero of those reps are currently women. [50:25] JL How could that be?! KL I know. SWB Man, misogyny runs real deep! [Sighs] so it’s not looking great. You know at the state level it’s actually a little better. So the level that Elizabeth is running at: 19 percent of our state legislature is made up of women. So there’s some women but it’s still definitely very, very low but something I’m really excited about that you can see in somebody like Lizz is that there are historic numbers of women running for office this year. So like 2018 is going to have just a huge number of women running at all levels. There was an article in The Cut last month from Rebecca Traister and she talked about how at that point, in January, 390 women said they were planning to run for the House of Representatives. And that’s higher than any year ever. And she also talked about how many of those people were black women. So 22 of them were non-incumbent black women. So new people entering the races and that’s like more black women than are in the House as a whole right now. There’s just like so many women running for office and I’m really excited to see that and I’m so excited for Lizz because I think she’s going to make a great candidate and a great representative. KL That’s so awesome … I remember the first time I met her and went to her house, I think it was right before she announced, and I was like, “How is this person going to do all of this?” You know it just seemed so daunting and I was levels removed but having seen her, the few times I’ve seen her just out in the field and talked to her, I see her doing it and I hear her talking about how she’s doing it and I’m like, “Ok,” it just makes me feel so much more encouraged and inspired that all of these women are getting into office or are getting into running and that it’s really possible. Fuck Yeah of the Week JL Hey! It’s time to celebrate even more awesome! You know when someone makes it a true Daily Double and they get the answer right? Or your home team makes it to the Super Bowl? That’s this next segment: the Fuck Yeah of the Week. Hey, Katel, what’s making you go, “Fuck yeah!” this week? KL You know I am so inspired by Lizz Fiedler’s interview that I started looking around and there’s great organizations supporting and promoting women running for office. It’s so cool. One called She Should Run, there’s another one called Rise to Run. And, of note, She Should Run, for example, has a tool that they have built called Ask a Woman to Run. It’s so cool. You can go to their website and literally nominate someone to run for office and provide a little information. It’s really, really cool. They also have a She Should Run incubator which meets women who are already sort of in the process, wherever they are in that process, to help them, support them, promote them to run which is so cool. SWB Wait, so can you tell me more about this? So if I go to She Should Run and I submit somebody that I think should run, what happens? KL You share the message with that person, so that’s really awesome. And they basically provide a bunch of resources to help them start and get on their way. SWB But it’s like a little nudge. KL Yeah. SWB You know I love this because when we were talking to Lizz she told that story about being in the car with her partner and they’re going somewhere and she’s like ranting and raving about what’s going on in local politics and how she wants to kind of make a difference and she’s feeling … you know like this urge to get involved in some way, and he’s just like, “You know you want to run for office?” I feel like having that external voice that’s like, “Hey, you know you want to do this.” Right? Like as she was saying, if you’re thinking about, you should do it. But I feel like it’s hard, right? Like I like getting involved with things, I like being civically active, but the idea of running for something is pretty scary and so there’s something to be said for somebody putting a little bit of their faith behind me in like a slightly more organized way than just saying it … over drinks. Like actually sitting down and being like, “No, go do this.” KL Yeah, I’m thinking back to [chuckles] — I don’t want to take us down a sad hole here but right after the election, the Trump election, I was like, “Shit, I need to mobilize a lot more,” and I just really had no idea where to start. And the immediate thought I had was I need to look at my friends and trust those friends who I know know what to do and where to start. So the fact that there are resources that help you do this now is just incredible. SWB You know and there’s a lot of new resources cropping up since the fall of 2016, for reasons that are probably pretty clear to our listeners, but there also are organizations that have been around a long time. Like I’ve long been a fan of EMILY’s List and I just recently found out that EMILY’s List is an acronym. I thought it was started by somebody named Emily. It stands for Early Money is Like Yeast. JL Woah! [55:16] SWB As in it makes the dough rise. Like, that the entire idea of it is that when you get early donations to a campaign, that really provides the foundation that allows a campaign to be successful. KL That’s a good acronym. SWB Who knew?! But I’ve long relied on EMILY’s List for information about who they’re supporting because it’s really focused on, particularly on pro-choice candidates, which is something that’s pretty important to me but … I’m so glad to see other organizations out there bolstering things because, as we heard, right? Like there’s a lot of work to be done to diversify who is in office and lots and lots of organizations to help us do it, I think can only make it better … So … Fuck yeah! Like fuck yeah, we got some work to do, politically speaking. But also a “Fuck Yeah” to all of these amazing women and also folks who are trans or nonbinary who have been cropping up in elections — I don’t know