Run, Women, Run (for political office)

In addition to The 2012 Project profiled in the Quarterly article, there are other routes into the field for women who aspire to public office.

Among them:

  • The Women’s Campaign School at Yale is a nonpartisan, issue-neutral political campaign training program. It provides training—mostly during its summer session—for women who want to run for office or who want to move up the ladder to higher elective office. It trains women to run political campaigns and to advance their careers in public service.
  • Running Start’s web site says  it is dedicated to inspiring young women to run for political office. Its goal is to increase the number of women in the United States who serve in elected office by planting the seed early that women are needed in politics. Its Young Women’s Political Leadership Program introduces 50 high school girls to the importance of political leadership. This five-day retreat in July includes workshops led by experts in the field on public speaking, messaging, networking, on-camera media training, and platform development. The goal of the program is to encourage the girls to channel their leadership into politics.
  • EMERGE America calls itself “the premier training program for Democratic women. We inspire women to run, we hone their skills to win. Our goal is clear: to increase the number of Democratic women in public office.
  • The Ready to Run program in New Jersey is a bi-partisan program for women who want to run for office, seek higher office, work on a campaign, get appointed to office, or learn more about the political system.  Ready to Run is one-stop training on running for office or getting involved in public life. You will learn from prominent elected and appointed leaders, campaign consultants, party officials, and policy experts.
  • The White House Project’s “Go Run” program  is a weekend-long training dedicated to equipping you, the future candidate, with the skills to run and win. The training aims to demystify the political process and inspire a richly diverse group of women in to the leadership pipeline. Go Run provides the nuts and bolts of running for political office by focusing on areas like communications, fundraising, and campaigning – skills you can use in your work and in your community up to the day you decide to run.

And here’s an info graphic by Good showing the current state of Congress, and what it would look like if it reflected the country’s makeup in terms of gender, race, religion, and political affiliation.

July 21, 2011

2 responses to “Run, Women, Run (for political office)”

  1. Anonymous says:
    August 25, 2011 at 8:14 am

    I could not agree
    more with you. It would be very important to get more women into politics in
    general. I think a lot of things would be run much better if with more women
    involved. I think this is a great initiative you are doing.