Molly Burke is a member of the 17th cohort of Women in Leadership. Molly is representing her cohort by talking about their catalytic project on our blog. At Coro, we are very pleased to share more information about this project with you.
The 17th cohort of Women In Leadership (WIL) is bursting with women who are passionate about gender equity and civic engagement in the Southwestern PA region. We have been working together since February with the understanding that women face many inequities, including those that take place in the work, government, and health sectors, and it’s important to learn and do what we can in order to affect change. The goal of the WIL program is for each woman to develop their personal leadership skills with the underlying goal of working toward improving the quality of life of all women in Southwestern PA by addressing the inequalities that she faces.
Throughout this 10 month period of time, our cohort has learned to connect, collaborate, and work together to achieve great things. On Thursday the 18th, we will conclude our time together with a combined event: The presentation of our catalytic project, “Our Voices, Our Stories,” and a graduation ceremony.
“Our Voices, Our Stories” is an oral history collection of 19 under-represented women in Southwestern PA that were identified and interviewed by the WIL cohort. Over the past 50 years, marginalized groups of women have developed, managed, and implemented grassroots initiatives to promote equity in the work, government, and health sectors. The media rarely records the struggles of marginalized people to improve their lives, leaving gaps in our understanding of the past.
While there have been efforts to capture the life stories of working people and minority groups, more remains to be done. The lack of information recorded in history books and through the media call upon the importance of oral history to record and preserve leadership initiatives for marginalized groups of people. However, oral history can aid in filling the gaps. Oral history provides the ability to re-examine the media’s effect on memory and contrast it with information gathered from storytelling.
The cohort decided to collect these important stories, an integral part of women’s history in Southwestern PA, and to archive them so that they can be accessed and referenced at any time in the future. The 19 stories that were collected range from 5 to 13 minutes in length, each rich with personal stories, anecdotes, and a glimpse of experiences as unique as the women who shared them.
After the cohort had our raw interviews recorded, the next step was to find a way to make them polished and easy to listen to. Luckily, fate intervened and we met TJ Harris from Lab Therapy, which is a company that specializes in audio and video production, entertainment, marketing and advertising. TJ was a fantastic community partner and supported the project and the cause, donating over $400 of in-kind services to professionally edit the interviews for the cohort.
After the interviews were edited, our cohort worked on developing partnerships with local area nonprofits who serve women and girls with the goal being to find a sustaining partner to continue the project after the current cohort has finished their time in Coro. After this phase, we worked to develop a website that would be able to host the interviews so that they would be accessible to all. This beautiful website will be premiered at the Project Celebration event on Thursday the 18th. If you haven’t already, please register to join us!
The WIL cohort would like to thank a few partners for making this project a reality. Without their support – both financial and in-kind – this project would not have been a reality.
Project Partners:
The Community, Organization, and Social Action (COSA) program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work prepares its students to empower people, lead organizations and grow communities.
| GTECH Strategies | Neighborhood Realty Services | TJ Harris at Lab Therapy | The YMCA of Greater Pittsburgh |
| Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management | The Hillman Foundation | The Richard King Mellon Foundation | The Pittsburgh Foundation |