The Female Lead Page 9
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I grew up in New Jersey, not far from New York City. I’ve worked since I was a young teenager, taking whatever jobs I could get – babysitting, lifeguarding, newspaper delivery. I left for college when I was 17 and returned to New York to work. After that I went to grad school in California, intending to go back to New York City after completing the course, but I never made it back. I met my husband, fell in love with him and fell in love with California. So after graduate school I started my own natural foods company. And several years after that, I was invited to speak to a group of high-school seniors. It changed my life.
These were high-school seniors who lived pretty proximate to me, but in a world apart. They wanted me to talk to them about college but very quickly I found out that almost none of the students that I was speaking to had taken the classes that allowed them even to apply to college.
I signed up to go in every week to meet with students and personally guide them through whatever process was available to them. Then I started meeting with teachers and administrators to talk about giving much more widespread support. Eventually, I sold my company and decided I would devote my life to opening up access to education for all students. That was the genesis of College Track.
Across the United States, the vast majority of families want their children to go to college and the students want this for themselves. But when you’re the first in your family, and if you’re a recent immigrant, or if you live in a community where you don’t know anyone who’s been to college, it’s very difficult to get the information that you need. So that’s what we do at College Track. We support students who are the first in their family to go to college, and we support their families as well. We focus first and fore-most on academic preparedness, but we also focus on social and emotional readiness, so that when students exit high school, they have a sense of self and a sense of confidence and purpose.
It’s so exciting to be part of the removal of obstacles for students who have so much promise, so much brilliance, and often don’t have any opportunity to express it. There’s nothing in the world like seeing someone’s life change. Every year I serve as a college advisor to high-school seniors. I get very close with them and typically continue that relationship through college and then through grad school or their first jobs. It’s just so beautiful to watch a young person who is full of vision and aspiration start to achieve some of their dreams.
At Emerson Collective, we all feel deeply fortunate to do the work that we do. We spend a lot of time in the field, we speak to people in communities, we think about obstacles with others in our network – that is, people in government and business – and civic leaders. We bring people together around a common goal. We get to be creative and we get to innovate. We don’t have to take systems and structures for granted. They’re not calcified and inflexible – things can be changed. It’s a rare privilege to realise that through our ideas, actions and work we can be a catalyst for change for the better in people’s lives.
One of our principles at Emerson, following the transcendentalists and [Ralph Waldo] Emerson himself, is the notion of self-reliance and self-determination, but you can’t have that unless you have access to the means by which you can rely on yourself – a healthy community, high-quality education, access to healthy food and clean water, and the kind of systems that allow an individual to reach his or her dreams.
We’re working on a big project called XQ: The Super School Project. It’s no surprise to any adult that high schools need to change. They’re exactly the same as they were when every single adult went to school. Nothing else in life has remained static for the past hundred years the way schools have. We have to remind people of all the changes that happened in the world while schools stayed frozen in time.
We don’t have to take systems and structures for granted. They’re not calcified and inflexible – things can be changed.
In September 2015, in partnership with the Entertainment Industry Foundation, we launched a national challenge for communities across America to redesign and rethink high school. We want communities to come together, get rooted in the student experience, really understand what students want in their lives, listen to them, interview them. All of the teams that have assembled across America have gone through 13 modules that we published online. In the process, they have learned about brain science, new teaching and learning techniques, and what new workforce demands are, and they’ve come up with very big ideas to change completely the high schools in their communities. Every single state put teams together. We have been overwhelmed, in the best way, with the response. It’s way beyond our wildest dreams.
All of us who work at Emerson have worked in communities – I’ve worked in College Track communities for almost 20 years – and we understand how knowledgeable, but generally how untapped, the thinkers and leaders are within communities. So we had a notion that, if we started at community level, and at community level they started by listening to students, and then architecting around that, we would get something special. And it’s happening. It’s really exciting to be in the middle of it.
Emerson Collective is still in early days. We’re looking at what can we accomplish in the next 20 years; we’re looking at all the structures and systems that contribute to inequality in America. The XQ challenge is a prime example – by galvanising communities to create solut-ions, we can ignite a new set of system-wide priorities to transform high schools to become far more innovative and effective for students.
We’re also seeing lots of opportunity around immigration and in some of the other justice work that we’re doing. Our objective is long-term, sustained systemic change, in systems and in opportunities, to make things much more equal, much more efficient for everyone. The best legacy I could have is not one that has my name on it, but one that has changed a whole host of lives because I tried to clear the path for individuals.
Laurene’s Object
A statue of Ganesh [the Hindu god portrayed with the head of an elephant]. I have several. Some are really tiny, some are larger. Ganesh is the remover of obstacles, among other things. If I feel obstacles are too complex and too complicated and too hard, I always have a Ganesh there, on my bedside table or on my desk at work, to remind me that all obstacles can be removed.
LAURENE POWELL JOBS
Founder and president of Emerson Collective
SAMANTHA POWER
Samantha Power is the 28th United States ambassador to the United Nations. She moved to the United States from Ireland when she was 9, becoming a US citizen at the age of 23. After graduating from Yale University, she began her career by covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a journalist. On her return to the US, she attended Harvard Law School, later developing a paper she wrote there into her first book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Power worked as an academic in human rights and public policy before joining Senator Barack Obama’s office as a foreign policy advisor. In January 2009 President Obama appointed her to the staff of the National Security Council, and in June 2013, he announced her nomination as US Ambassador to the United Nations.
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I’m originally Irish. Both my parents are Irish and my mother came to the United States of America in 1979. The fact that my family was in Ireland, and I remain connected with them, certainly gave me an interest in events overseas. My mother is a medical doctor and so is my stepfather. I was directly inspired by the passion they put into their work and the compassion they showed their patients.
I had recently graduated from university when I opened the New York Times in 1992 and saw images out of Europe that I didn’t think one could see in the 1990s – bone-thin, stick figures in camps in the former Yugoslavia. I wanted to go over and help, but I didn’t have any skills. I had been a reporter in college – a sports reporter – so I decided to try my luck at being a war correspondent. It was a bit of a crazy idea, but a lot of young people were doing the same thing becaus
e they felt horrified and powerless. The journalistic community was remarkably easy to break into. Most of my best friends today are from that period. We were very tightknit, and we all wanted to do what we could to help.
I’m not great at languages, but I’m great at talking, and my stubborn desire to communicate with people got me to the point, eventually, where I could do interviews in the local language. When I came back, I wrote about my experience, and my way of doing that was not to write a memoir, but to look at the question of why the United States did what it did when faced with genocide in the 20th century. One key conclusion, after six years of research, was how hard it was to make change. But it still felt as though no other organisation could make an impact like the US government. There were many examples of American action doing good – and occasions when it didn’t – and it seemed to me that maybe it would be more efficient to be inside the government, trying to secure those better, more noble outcomes, than to be on the outside throwing darts at US officials, which had been my tendency.
Whether any of that would have translated into going into government had I not met Barack Obama, I’m not sure – but when I did meet him, I felt he was a real kindred spirit. When I started working with him, I had no thought in my mind that he would run for president!
Since I’ve been in my job, I’ve tried to inject individual stories into everything I do – real faces and real people.
I have always followed my gut professionally. I moved to the Balkans without a job and wound up as a war reporter; later I left law school to work on a book because the topic had seized me. These weren’t steps forward on a conventional path, as my mother frequently pointed out. So my advice for young people would be not to decide on some title and try to script your path toward it, but to develop your interests, dig into them – go deep instead of wide. Learn something about something. I took a roundabout way, but I ended up inside the White House and ultimately inside the President’s cabinet, advocating many of the same positions that I had advocated as a human rights activist and as a writer.
When I joined the administration, I found that, even with the best will, the crises and conflicts I had covered as a journalist were often reduced to abstract terms and concepts in the frequently mundane debates within the walls of the United Nations. So, since I’ve been in my job, I’ve tried to inject individual stories into everything I do – real faces and real people. When I chaired a meeting on Ebola as President of the Security Council, instead of having only the experts speak, we had a health worker from Liberia talk to us, via video conference, about having just had to turn away a father carrying his daughter, who was infected, because the clinic had no free beds. He described the father leaving his daughter on the side of the road because if he brought her home, he knew she would infect the rest of the family.
Empowering women to get involved in government and diplomacy does bring a different set of perspectives, which benefits everyone. This isn’t a theory; it’s a fact.
I’m not automatically for a particular set of values because I’m a woman, but empowering women to get involved in government and diplomacy does bring a different set of perspectives, which benefits everyone. This isn’t a theory; it’s a fact. The involvement of women in peace processes, for instance, tends to increase the likelihood that whatever plan is produced will hold. According to the UN, women’s participation increases the probability of peace agreements lasting 15 years by 35 per cent.
I’ve had young children while I have been doing this job. My son was born in 2009 and my daughter in 2012. My way of making peace with this period is that I know I won’t be in the job forever and it’s an opportunity to introduce my children to a magnificent global culture. I hope as a result they’ll be more empathetic, more globally curious, than they might otherwise have been. My son is a big baseball fan, as am I, and he has committed me to something very robust. When I’m finished, we’re going to travel around the United States and see a game in each of the different ballparks. I hope to make up for some of the lost time, spending more time in the playground than in the Security Council. That day will come. Life is about cycles, I think.
Samantha’s Object
A framed political cartoon that I keep in my office. It has two panels, one atop the other. In the first, a man stands behind a podium that bears the UN logo, asking a crowd of assembled delegates, ‘Who wants change?’ All members of the audience have raised their hands enthusiastically. In the second panel, below, the same man behind the podium asks, ‘Who wants to change?’ Every member of the same audience looks down, avoiding eye contact. No hands are raised.
What I appreciate about this cartoon is how pointedly it delivers the message that if we really want to see bold action taken, we must first recognise what it requires of ourselves. As individuals, communities, or countries, we find it much easier to agree on the need for change than to change our own habits and practices. We hope change can come without sacrifice – who wouldn’t? – but it rarely does. The cartoon is a daily reminder that in the pursuit of meaningful global – and national, and even personal – solutions, change starts with each of us.
SAMANTHA POWER
United States ambassador to the United Nations
JULIE BENTLEY
Julie Bentley is chief executive officer of Girlguiding. Since she joined the organisation in 2012, the Guides have become more visible and campaigning, with protests against sexual harrassment and calls for politicians to listen to girls’ concerns. Julie Bentley has spent her career in the voluntary sector. In her previous job as the chief executive officer of the FPA (Family Planning Association), she fought to change the abortion laws in Northern Ireland, campaigned against a change in the time limit on abortions in the rest of the UK and argued for mandatory sex education in schools. She has also been chief executive officer of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and worked in alcohol and drug services. She began her tenure at Girlguiding by declaring that it is ‘the ultimate feminist organisation’.
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I had no ambition when I was young. I was an incredibly shy and anxious child and not very academically bright. I hated studying and thought I was rubbish. I got three O Levels, in English, art and sociology. It was only when I got to around the age of 18 that I began to find my confidence. I’m not sure what changed. I’d been head girl at school – how that happened is a bit of a mystery, but I put myself forward because I felt it was important and because I was encouraged by others. The job involved raising money for charity and in that year I became interested in the not-for-profit sector. It opened my eyes to the idea of being a citizen and putting something back into society. I became interested in youth work when I was still a youth myself.
You spend most of your life at work and you need to know you’re doing something worthwhile. We’re put on the earth for a certain period of time and we have a choice how to use it.
I worked for five years as a post lady. I’d get up at 4.30am, do seven hours tramping the streets delivering mail, go home and have an hour’s sleep, then go out and start volunteering. I worked as a volunteer at a drop-in centre and on a drug and alcohol programme, and I did a huge amount to gain experience. That’s where my belief in volunteering comes from. At the age of 24, I moved to London and worked in Bermondsey with people with drug and alcohol issues. I was doing outreach on the streets. The area was very difficult – completely different from how it is now. I worked with some fantastic but very challenged young people. I came from quite a nice little town in Essex, near Chelmsford, and it was a really formative experience to see the extent of the problems they faced, but also their spirit and potential.
The chief executive of that charity took a punt and employed me even though I didn’t have any paid experience or qualifications. With her support, I did a diploma in counselling and then another one in management. I was ready to learn at that point, and what I was learning was something I could relate to real life. I did a part-time Open University degree while I was still working fu
ll-time and I studied for an MBA in my early 30s. By the time I left that job seven years later, I was the deputy director.
I think it’s important for young people to realise that you can come from a non-academic family or a working-class background and still find your own way to success. You don’t need to have been really clever at school. All you need is to be willing to work hard and apply yourself. It’s never too late.
It caused a bit of a stir when I said Girlguiding was a feminist organisation but to me it’s a no-brainer. For me, feminism is very straightforward. It means parity with men, politically, economically and socially, and Girlguiding has always been about encouraging equality for girls. It’s a misconception that I’m trying to make it a feminist organisation. It already is.
I do think there are huge pressures on girls now, particularly as a result of social media. There’s so much more stress on conforming. Young women are more exposed to stereotypes of female beauty than I ever was and we’re seeing huge pressure to achieve academically. So much of girls’ time can be focused on a need to be perfect. It detracts from being young. In our most recent survey of girls’ attitudes we found that girls now are worrying about different things from those that occupied their parents – mental health, jobs and the future.