Apr 5, 2019
On Today’s Global Cable, Perry World House Deputy Director LaShawn Jefferson will be talking with Veronica Gago, a professor at the National University of San Martin in Argentina, Joanne Smith, the founding president and CEO of Girls for Gender Equity, an advocacy group committed to the physical, psychological, social, and economic development of girls and women, and Veronica Avila, the national campaign co-manager with Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a restaurant workers’ center committed to improving wages and working conditions for the nation’s restaurant workforce about important issues facing women and girls in the world today and the importance of grassroots organizations in the #MeToo movement across the world!
LaShawn Jefferson is Perry World House’s Deputy Director. She brings to Perry World House over two decades of legal and policy advocacy, strategic planning and communications, and research and writing on women’s international human rights through civil-society organizations and philanthropy. She joined Perry World House after almost seven years at the Ford Foundation, where she worked to advance women’s human rights globally and in the U.S. through field building and investments in the areas of rights advocacy; strategic communications and engagement; intersectional leadership and analysis; research; and capacity building. For fourteen years, she also held several leadership positions at Human Rights Watch, a global human rights organization, where she led their women’s rights research and advocacy work, providing strategic and intellectual guidance to the work on women’s international human rights, crafting and executing long-term advocacy strategies, and representing HRW at the highest level of national and international fora. She is the author of many reports on a variety of issues confronting women around the world, and has written op-eds and articles that have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The International Herald Tribune. She received a BA from Connecticut College and an MA in International Relations and Latin American Studies from Johns Hopkins SAIS.
Veronica Avila is currently the National Campaign co-manager with the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United), a restaurant workers’ center committed to improving wages and working conditions for the nation’s restaurant workforce. Previously she served as a researcher with ROC-United and as the Director of ROC Chicago. In addition to supporting ROC-United's campaign work, she is currently a fellow with Data and Society, looking at the cross section of tech and restaurants. Prior to her work with ROC-United, Avila worked a labor rights organizer with service worker unions, Unite Here Local 1 and SEIU 32BJ. Avila holds an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science from the London School of Economics.
Verónica Gago is a professor at the Instituto de Altos Estudios at the National University of San Martín, in Argentina, and a visiting scholar at the University of Buenos Aires, in its International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. Gago teaches Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires and is a professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, National University of San Martín. She is also an Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque and of numerous articles published in journals and books throughout Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos, which is a Latin America grassroots, feminist movement that works to eradicate gender-based violence.
Joanne N. Smith is the Founding President and CEO moves Girls for Gender Equity (GGE), an intergenerational advocacy organization committed to the physical, psychological, social, and economic development of girls and women. Smith advances GGE’s mission through strategic advocacy, development, and leadership cultivation. A staunch human rights advocate, Smith co-chaired the nation’s first Young Women’s Initiative, a cross-sector Initiative coordinating government, philanthropic, and community efforts to create the conditions for cis, trans girls of color and GNC youth to thrive. Smith’s leadership helped to facilitate a $30M commitment from government and philanthropy to invest in community-driven recommendations. Smith is a steering committee member of Black Girl Movement and member of Move to End Violence -a 10-year initiative designed to strengthen the collective capacity to end gender-based violence in the United States. Smith is an alumna of Hunter Graduate School of Social Work and Columbia Institute for Nonprofit Management. GGE challenges structural forces - racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, economic inequality - that work to constrict the freedom, full expression, and rights of girls and young women of color (trans and cis) and gender non-conforming/non-binary youth.
Music & Produced by Tre Hester.