On Your Sleeve: #TakeAction series 1 of 9
BE STRONG!
This past holiday season, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) made donations to both Generation Citizen and the International Model United Nations Association on behalf of its clients. Along with a card explaining the contributions, each recipient also got nine TAKE ACTION embroidered patches (all of which can be seen in the header art of this publication’s main page).
In a series of short articles that will follow this one, we’ll feature each of these patches and its theme — showcasing a certain surge in action each month, highlighting a few of our closest partners in the category, and commenting on what wearing the patch in 2018 means to us.
But, as with any personal adornment, or sign we carry, or phrase we say, how others view it reflects their own human experience, and we are grateful if this image means something special and different to you. Please share! #TakeAction
FIRST: WOMEN IN JANUARY
There seemed to be two significant differences at this year’s Women’s March, as compared to last year…aside from the fact that last year I was in Washington, D.C., and this year I was in Los Angeles, CA.
The first was a florescence of ancillary activities, which showed creativity and ingenuity in a truly American way — the makers of off-brand concert tee-shirts were out in force, the food trucks and vendors were plentiful, and the auxiliary spaces that supported women and other marginalized groups were robust and substantive (rather than thrown-together). We were industrious over the last year. Whereas in 2017, there were informal lounges or meetup points or evening parties after the march, 2018 had events like INTO ACT!ON. With our friends at TaskForce PR at the helm, INTO ACT!ON took place January 13–21 and was a dynamic pop-up social justice festival of art and ideas, celebrating community power and cultural resistance through creative installations, music performances, panel discussions and activist workshops.
Also, the weekend of marches across the country culminated in a new layer of the Women’s March movement, Sunday’s Power to the Polls event in Las Vegas, NV. As described by the organizers, #PowerToThePolls “will launch a national voter registration tour one year after the historic Women’s March on Washington. This next stage of the movement will channel the energy and activism of the Women’s March into tangible strategies and concrete wins in 2018.”
With the growing tide of #YesAllWomen and #MeToo and #TimesUp and #WhyWeWearBlack and #WomensMarch and #PowerToThePolls, the wave of change is nearing its crest, and hopefully, we will all ride that wave to equality together.
The CAA Foundation has always worked with organizations that empower women and girls — from Women for Women International to Step Up Women’s Network, from the Malala Fund to WriteGirl, from Girl Scouts to the Lower Eastside Girls Club, from CARE to Planned Parenthood, from Girl Up to Girl Rising. This is by no means a comprehensive list: there are girls’ schools, girls’ after-school programs, girls’ mentoring programs, women’s housing, women’s associations, legal action groups, research groups, treatment centers, and so much more.
Tell us your favorite girls’ and women’s organizations, and #TakeAction for them!
