Young Women in Digital: "What's Your Side Hustle?"

I had a blast at Young Women in Digital's "What's Your Side Hustle?" event. Things got off to a creative start at Communispace's gorgeous Congress Street location while we heard from contestants vying for YWD's Side Hustle Scholarship. 

Keynote Speaker: Siobhan Dullea, Chief Client Strategist at Communispace

Finalists included:

Becky Brackett of Pop & Circumstance (@popcircumstance)

Ty Flores of Style Your Curves (@styleurcurves)

Elizabeth Dobskra of StoryNest (@StoryNest)

Laur Fisher of The Civic Series (@CivicSeries)

Becky's Pop & Circumstance focuses on vintage home decor and the glory that I lovingly refer to as Pinterest Perfect.

Style Your Curves is the brainchild of Ty, a gorgeous powerhouse with a passion for plus size apparel and a background in fashion.

Elizabeth from StoryNest bowled me over with her audio component for family historians - and she included endearing tidbits about her family's immigration story.

Laur Fisher's presentation about The Civic Series' sessions on current events and world issues was so engaging that I scribbled something to the effect of "YOU HAVE TO LET ME VOLUNTEER WITH YOU" on the back of my card before nearly pulling a muscle to slip it to her during the presentations. 

While Becky went away with the win, the other hustles were no slouches.  I definitely had a favorite...but I'll let you in on that secret at the end. ;)

After the presentations wrapped, we took some photos, grabbed more snacks and drinks, and settled back in for a sure-to-be-amazing panel. 

Panelists included:

Windsor Hanger, Co-Founder / Publisher / President at HerCampus (@HerCampus)

Jackie Schon, Creative Director and Co-Founder at The Paint Bar (@ThePaintBar)

Elyssa Albert, UX/UI Designer at WeSpire (@goWeSpire)

Lauren Joseph, Director of Business Development at The Grommet (@TheGrommet)

I thought about how often we equate being timid with humility and consideration. I reminisce about conditions that have brought out the best in me - usually having been a result of too little time and too few resources. Most importantly, it became glaringly clear how trepidation and self-doubt bare their teeth and devour our projects before we even get them started.

It's a freeing feeling, to go boldly where you've never gone, against advice from your inner circle and in direct defiance of the alarms going off in your own mind. If I took anything away from that night (besides many a business card, of course), it's that your dream will almost always get you into trying situations (because they are, in fact, trying situations). Whether or not the phrase attributed to him were ever truly uttered by Henry Ford*, they remain fitting: if you ask most people what they want, they'll ask for more of the familiar. 

I sat in that audience and scanned the room, impressed by the panel, swooning from the Malbec and elevator pitches, with a renewed resolve and belief in what I bring to the table. This is what happens when people gather - iron sharpens iron and we go away with new language and capacity for vision, passion and resolve. 

Organizations like Young Women in Digital get it right: they know that the best communities draw on the greatest gifts individuals have to offer and create space for exchange and growth. Who are we when we decide that standing still is not an option? What do we become when we realize that we'll only have what we engineer? 

Builders, Creators, Hustlers - that's what.

And which presentation knocked me over? StoryNest, of course. I am, if anything, a lover of narrative. Here's StoryNest founder Elizabeth Dobskra sharing about what sets her hustle apart.

* Henry Ford was attributed with the quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses." A 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review teased out the debate.  

Photographer: Katherine Eckenfels, Designer at HB Agency and Hustler at 90 Days of Design

Event Co-Sponsors:

Startup Institute / Communispace / Whole Foods Market

Scholarship Sponsors:

The Grommet / WeSpire / beStyled / ZappRx /

Heart n' Stomach PR and Marketing / intelligent.ly / General Assembly

Goodie Bag Sponsors:

BeStyled provided each attendee with a Complementary Blowdry card and General Assembly offered a free one-month trial of GA Front Row

Read about Young Women in Digital and tweets from that night at #YWDSideHustle.

Massachusetts' Governor Deval Patrick Signs Anti-Shackling Law

Mac D'Alessandro: Closing Remarks at NARAL's Annual Event (Video)

Senator Karen Spilka and Representative Kay Kahn (Video)

Governor Patrick Sign Anti-Shackling Legislation Into Law (Video)

A wise woman once told us that "there are years that ask questions and years that answer". 

Zora Neale Hurston was right.

I got involved with MassNOW's Legislative Task Force at a friend's request and I'll admit it: it was intimidating to be part of a group dedicated to combating societal woes by changing laws. It'd be an understatement to say that I was nervous about contributing to a Task Force comprised of lawyers, professors and lobbyists.

I was a volunteer with a heart of gold and the gift of gab...and no legislative experience. 

So, I began to get my bearings during our meetings, jotting down notes about politicians and useful nuggets about the process of reconciling different versions of bills. I also made the mistake of trying to morph my contribution into something that I thought would more closely resemble others' (you know, in an effort to be more "legislative"), but after a lil' while, I decided to shake things up:

I decided to be brave enough to honor my friend's invitation. I began to serve our (un)common goal by doing what I do best - speaking and writing from a place of cultural critique and conviction, earnestly crafting and sharing narratives that are close to my heart, and imploring people to reconsider the unchecked notions they've held dear for so long.

I began to do this across the country while I traveled for work and pleasure - from lines at the grocery store and to the front rows of lecture halls. I started random hashtags around which people from all over the country could engage one another in conversation about what was happening in Massachusetts. You see, I had to learn that there's a place in every movement for people like me. At that point, I wasn't familiar with how the sausage is made - I was just intensely aware that we needed to make and eat the high-quality kind. 

I was drawing on the very best parts of myself to help engineer a better, more considerate society by helping Massachusetts pass an Anti-Shackling law. I was doing this as a descendant of Black women who'd been sharecroppers and slaves, women who'd historically been deprived of autonomy over their own bodies and the conditions during which they gave birth.

I'd spent the summer of 2013 back home in Chicago hammering out organizational testimony in support of the Healthy Youth Bill (that would require that sex ed be medically accurate, age-appropriate and not abstinence-only) when I Skyped into the Task Force meeting and heard about shackling in Massachusetts prisons. 

You see, I've mentioned my family's complicated history in the States in previous posts. I experienced a disgusting, guttural reaction when I first heard about the practice. It struck me immediately as a remnant of our slaveholding past. Maybe it was being back home in Chicago, a city whose juvenile detention center holds three times as many people as the adult one, a city whose state had passed two versions of the law in the past ten years, a state that was rich in cultural memory as a former Mecca for people who'd aspired to make a shift from the Deep South during the Great Migration like my grandparents. 

Whatever it was, my mind and heart could not let go of Anti-Shackling. See, I grew up in a family of faith. I often heard riveting sermons delivered over pulpits that implored congregants to engineer a sort of heaven on earth. Even though I've moved away from some of that theological foundation, a Gospel song modeled after Habakkuk 2:2 played in my mind constantly during that year: "Write (down) the vision, make it plain, that they may run and not faint. They shall walk and not get weary; they shall run and not faint."

Anti-Shackling, in my mind, was a message that needed to be spread. People needed to be repulsed and horrified by what was going on. People needed to be rendered uncomfortable by torture written into law. As a Task Force member, I'd gotten my vision...and now I intended to use my skills to make it plain. I shared about what Massachusetts was doing everywhere I went - from every airport, to every worker in every gas station, and every bowtie-clad, tome-toting and tort-laden law student in the Boston metro area.

What really sticks out in my mind is the everyday reaction of people I spoke to at those bus stops, in those grocery store lines and lecture halls. No matter where I was, while some people pushed back against the practice simply because it existed, most recoiled in horror because it existed in Massachusetts...

...because they would've believed it was Mississippi. 

Most of the incredulity I encountered came from people who refused to believe that "this could happen here", "that a blue state could allow this to happen". I heard this from people who swore that "this wasn't the South we were talking about". 

After two glorious months back home in the Land of Lincoln, I hightailed it back to Boston and told the Task Force that I wanted to focus on this, that this is a practice that has its feet in one facet of America's Deepest Shame, and that I had no intention of leaving the legislation without some intentional public support. MassNOW got me in touch with NARAL's Celia Segel (bless her heart and temerity) and that was the beginning of a beautiful Anti-Shackling friendship...that eventually blossomed into a coalition of more than a dozen organizations.

I might not have gone to law school and I don't see myself going any time soon, but I do know a couple things: the world has never improved because people stayed silent...and social change has never come about because people checked their hearts and moral compasses at the door. Lastly, because I come from a tradition that honors our inherent humanity by bending toward Justice, I know that progress can only happen when we remembe history.

The year 2001 asked the question by way of Representative Kahn's initial bill.

By becoming the 20th state to ban the practice, Massachusetts has contributed to being part of the answer. Let's keep going -

...we're not weary - and we're not inclined to faint.

A Glimpse at the Ideologue: The Things Currently On Her Mind

1. Visual Education's Classical Greek Vocabulary cards / 2. 0.3 fl oz. Home Fragrance Oils by The Body Shop (in Tobacco Flower, Vanilla & Tonka Bean, Satsuma, and Exotic) / 3. RJ's All-Natural Raspberry Licorice Log / 4. Box of matches from a recent trip to The Hawthorne Bar / 5. Pink Heart pin from Black Ink's Harvard Square location / 6. White Rabbit candies (in plain and banana) / 7. 20 fl. oz. Starbucks travel tumbler / 8. Gene Dattel's Cotton and the Making of America (here's a link to my 2012 post on his Massachusetts Historical Society lecture) / 9. Wagamama Take Out menu / 10. Espresso maker from Ikea / 11. Martha Stewart cork screw and bottle opener / 12. 36 GB flash drive (for all my top secret blogger info) / 13. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (translated by Ralph Manheim)

W. B. Yeats once said that it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of our own souls than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

The same holds true for societies.

If there is hope, it lies in the willingness to become familiar with the underside of History, in the unflinching bravery to learn from times we allowed evil to go unchecked, and in humanity's inextinguishable desire to bend toward Justice.

14. Harney & Sons Earl Grey Imperial tea / 15. La Vie de La Vosgienne Strawberry Drops / 16. Morelli linguine pasta with black squid ink from Cardullo's in Harvard Square / 17. Anthropologie's 1.6 fl. oz. Eau de toilette Vanille / 18. Keys with red dala horse keychain (from The Sweden Shop in Chicago, IL) / 19. Chronicle Books' Paper Chess set