Over the past semester, AIDemocracy’s Health program, in partnership with the Sierra Club’s Population Program, has sponsored a small group of students to create innovative campaigns around global sexual and reproductive health and family planning issues. These students came to Washington DC in January, where they met with family planning and reproductive health experts, and trained with AIDemocracy’s central staff to prepare their campaigns and utilize new media. Since January, the students have worked to create substantive change at their universities and in politics by holding rallies and events. Their events included everything from art exhibits to meeting with representatives to even hourglass-shaped cookie sales (representing the timely nature of emergency contraception). They documented their experiences on film over the semester and produced the films provided below as toolkits or guides for other students. Their efforts and campaign films are being promoted here at our website, as well as at websites of our partners, to inspire and inform other reproductive rights and justice advocates as they initiate similar campaigns.
MEET our 2009 Innovators
Alicia Johnson – Boston College
Alicia Johnson is an undergraduate junior at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, MA, majoring in Linguistics with minors in Women’s Studies and Mathematics. This past year, she served as Director of Women’s Issues for the Undergraduate Government of BC, and will continue in 2009-2010. Through the student government she got involved with a great group of activists who together formed BC Students for Sexual Health.
Lindsey Fuller – Ohio State University
Lindsey Fuller is a senior biology major at The Ohio State University who has eventual hopes of attending medical school. As a sophomore she experienced life in India for several months, which kicked open a door to many new interests, including the link between empowerment and the health of women. Lindsey’s involvement on campus include organizing and performing in The Vagina Monologues and other vagina-loving events as part of V-Day OSU, working for The Global Health Initiative, and acting as the Stop Violence Against Women committee leader for OSU’s Amnesty International. As an AID Innovator, Lindsey and her fellow leaders rallied on campus and lobbied their senator to support international comprehensive family planning.
Jennifer Keeter – University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Jennifer is currently a senior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is a co-leader of a women’s group on campus called Women in Learning and Leading (WILL). Their activities included orgainizing a Global Women’s Health Action Week on campus. This event addressed STI’s, Environmental Justice, Reproductive Justice, and Maternal & Child Health, as well as Holistic Health. The Action Week was physically and intellecutually engaging. Their main goal was to raise awareness and show the campus community the importance of taking action. Everyday was something different!
Kimberley D.C. Schroder – Cornell University
Kimberley D.C. Schroder switched coasts after growing up in Lafayette, CA. She is concentrating in Sustainable Development at Cornell University. She studied community-based sustainable development in Senegal. She also interned for the Transport Research Institute, based at Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. She has attended many conferences and trainings related to sustainability and activism, such as Sustainable Ivies, Change It!, Women for Sustainable Development, and the One Voice Summit. At Cornell, she is active in Sustainability Hub, Kyoto Now!, and Roots & Shoots, among other groups. Sustainability means more than just managing resources efficiently – it’s about people, and setting up societies to truly meet basic needs in the larger holistic picture.
Nichole Young-Lin – Columbia University
B.A. University of California, Berkley
Nichole is currently a student in the premedical post-baccalaureate program at Columbia University. She graduated from UC Berkeley with bachelor’s degrees in political economy of industrial societies and public health. She founded Saving Mothers following her thesis, “Misoprostol and Traditional Birth Attendants: A Life-Saving Combination.” In the past two years, she has worked with traditional birth attendants in Uganda to evaluate rural medical supplies and prevent obstetric fistulae, and personally delivered birthing kits and training materials to villages in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
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Jen Crick – Swarthmore College
Jen is a junior at Swarthmore College majoring in Political Science and minoring in Environmental Studies. She is active in the College Democrats and on the executive board of her school’s chapter of Feminist Majority. She got involved in the Sierra Club by attending the One Voice Summit in DC and by participating in their 2008 study tour to the Philippines where she had the opportunity to learn about programs that integrate health and the environment to sustainably meet the needs of both people and the planet. She’s shown in this picture meeting with her Congressman on a lobbying day she organized for Innovators.
Kiki Kalkstein – University of California, Berkley
Kiki is a fourth year student majoring in Public Health and minoring in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interests include reproductive health, healthcare reform, and global health. Last summer she worked for a non-governmental organization in Uganda on a project on obstetric fistula. She also served as an intern for a UCSF Reproductive Health clinical trial and recruited women to participate in the study. She is currently the committee chair for the Health Policy and Advocacy Committee of the Cal Undergrad Public Health Coalition.
Ciara Conway – Rhodes College
Ciara is a senior at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. At Rhodes, she is the president of VOX: Voices for Planned Parenthood. Currently, they are celebrating the acquirement of a condom machine on campus and the success of a Free EC Day. She is thrilled that she has been able to make very real connections for her peers about sexual and reproductive health and the environment. In the future, she looks forward to connecting sexual and reproductive health with many other things.
Other Innovators Who Advocated for International Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights on Their Campuses
Aviva Rosman – University of Chicago
Aviva is a junior at the University of Chicago majoring in public policy with a concentration in feminist studies. On campus, Aviva serves as a peer educator on sexual violence prevention and is working with other activists to change her school’s sexual assault policy. As a Sierra Club Global Population and Environment fellow, she is coordinating a video petition on Chicago college campuses in support of the Illinois Reproductive Justice and Access Act and planning an event for Earth Day.
Erin Moore – University of Chicago
Erin Moore grew up in Boulder City, Nevada and brings five years of program and academic experience with girls’ empowerment programs and community organizing to the Southern Nevada Young Women’s Collaborative. For four years at the University of Chicago, she led Women and Youth Supporting Each Other (WYSE), a nationwide, curriculum-based girls’ mentoring organization. Currently a member of WYSE’s National Board of Directors, she organized WYSE’s National Leadership Training Conference for branch directors from around the country in the summer of 2007. Erin was also a campus organizer for an Advocates for Youth campaign. Erin is now excited to serve as a “Fellow” with the Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program.
Rosy Ricks – Alverno College
Rosy is a hard workin’ mama and advocate for social change. After recently finishing up a term with AmeriCorps Public Allies as a Disaster Education Outreach Specialist at the American Red Cross of Southeastern Wisconsin, ricks is currently employed full-time as a residential manager at a men’s homeless shelter. She is also enrolled in Alverno College’s Community Leadership undergraduate program, and writes regularly for Citigal Magazine, a Women’s business and Empowerment Magazine based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Sirina Keesara – University of California, Berkeley
Sirina Keesara graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Anthropology in 2008 and will be attending medical school next year. She traveled to Ghana in the Fall of 2007 and Summer of 2008 to conduct a research project about barriers to fertility regulation for Ghanaian women. Through her study of the Ghanaian healthcare system, she became interested in international global health policy and the organizations that govern it. She hopes to influence policy by organizing grassroots effort behind the issue of population justice!
Marcella Lucente – University of California, Riverside
Shabina Shariff – Portland State University
Shabina is a senior at Portland State University, majoring in International Studies. She got her start in organizing at SPROG, a week long summer camp dedicated to training in grassroots organizing and leadership development. Shabina has recently been active in her community holding workshops showing the relationship between sex and sustainability. When not organizing, Shabina spends her time watching Grey’s Anatomy, talking Bollywood with her friends, hiking and camping .
Adjoa Tetteh – Mentor, B.A. University of Chicago
While still a student at the University of Chicago, Adjoa Tetteh began advocating for what she calls “a more comprehensive and medically accurate approach” to sex education in Chicago schools and communities. In 2005, she hooked up with the Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program, where she has explored the “deep interconnections” between sex education and social, economic, and environmental issues.
