At this week's Emily and Hannah spoke with Sarah Jakle, Founder and Executive Director of DemocraShe. Previously Sarah served as the Get Out The Vote Director for the California National Organization for Women and National Outreach Director for Field Team 6, leading the innovative effort to register voters using effective issue-based voter registration techniques. Empowering women to hold political office has been a focus since Sarah first interned at the Women’s Council of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in college.
Prior to creating DemocraShe, Sarah practiced as a social worker in Los Angeles, helping adults coping with mental illnesses, addiction, and homelessness. She is a current Fellow with Obama’s Organizing For Action and serves on the Board of Directors for Urban Partners Los Angeles. She discussed her journey in civic engagement from being a social worker through becoming an activist to feeling the need to create DemocraShe for intersectional women stepping into roles of democracy.
A large part of why Sarah created DemocraShe was to build skills into early women's leadership training in response to what she saw happening to women candidates in 2018 and 2020 who were stepping up to try to serve their country yet were brutally attacked and all the more across any intersectional identity. She recognized the need to help women build skills to manage our nervous systems and deal with both the imposter syndrome that can lead us to count ourselves out AND the pushback that comes when we step up to lead.
Sarah explained DemocraShe's curriculum and what it entails, specifically zooming in on the power of incorporating resiliency and political skills for high school students. Getting civically engaged can been difficult for young people and we discussed each of our journeys and how our experiences have been to date, backlash and all. We ended the episode by discussing two concrete skills that we can immediately draw upon in our lives: our practices with Grounding and our Inner Best Friend. Thank you for listening!
