West Indies Women Win

A University of the West Indies Elect Her attendee shares her elevator speech during the campaign simulation exercise.

I knew Elect Her was going to be great at the University of West Indies at Mona when I was invited the first night to come meet the team and attend a dance performance on campus.  It seemed that everyone we met was coming to the training the next day, and there was a lot of enthusiasm!

On Saturday morning I entered a huge room already filled with young women, even though we had an hour until the training started.  I sat and talked with three young women who were all in engineering programs and hoped to go into technical fields.  They were passionate about politics and leadership, and wanted to learn how to become leaders in a field where few women made it to the top.

The training was a huge success! Over 75 students attended from not only all over Jamaica, but from nearby islands as well, including Barbados.  Most were college students, but a few groups of high school students attended as well.  Nadeen Spence, who is officially the Student Services and Development Manager at UWI, but is unofficially the godmother for all girls on campus, began the day.  She set the perfect tone for the day by talking about the impact that Elect Her has already had on the student government at UWI.  When the trainings began three years ago, the university had not had a female president in 12 years.  This is especially shocking because the student body is almost 80% female!  After the 2010 Elect Her training, a woman won as president of the student body, and today both the president and the vice president are women.

With that great news to set the stage, we began a lively day of training, including hearing from two members of Parliament—Senator Kamina Johnson Smith and Senator Marlene Malahoo Forte—and from Dr. Leith Dunn, who runs Gender Studies at the university.  The only problem with the day was that the young women had so many questions and comments that we ran way behind schedule, which was not such a bad problem to have!  The highlight for me was the student government panel.  Krystal Tomlinson, Sasha Gaye Wright, and Jodian Freckleton spoke about why they ran for office, and what they have accomplished.  My favorite was Freckelton, whose campaign was “Vote for Freckles!”

At the end of the long day, Nadeen and I sent the young women out to see who could get the most votes for a campaign simulation.   They only had 30 minutes, and I was not optimistic that they would get very many signatures, so I was really surprised when there were several who had received more than 50 and the winner, Chamion Blake, got over 70!  Remember that name—she will be running the country some day!

 

This post was written by Running Start President and Founder Susannah Shakow