Nicholas Kristof speaking to members of NY Women in Communications at Time Inc. Building, Monday, Sept. 13
Team She’s the First and our supporters are naturally big fans of Nicholas Kristof. Would you call him anything but the greatest humanitarian journalist of our time? His column in the New York Times and book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (written with his wife and fellow Times reporter, Sheryl WuDunn) tell us the stories of individual girls and women behind the overwhelming statistics of gender inequality and abuse. We’ve admired his work from afar, follow his Tweets daily, and last March, we even went to the Loews theatre to watch the one-night-only, nationally screened Half the Sky Live event [see blog post]. This past, Monday, we finally had the chance to meet Mr. Kristof and introduce She’s the First!
Tammy Tibbetts (2nd from left) with She's the First Fans Allison Rapson and Daphne Foreman, and our Researcher at Ithaca College, Elizabeth Stoltz
Mr. Kristof was speaking at an event for New York Women in Communications, Inc., a professional organization that has awarded scholarships to three of the She’s the First leadership team members (Tammy, Christen, Elizabeth), and to a few of the young women who have planned grassroots fundraisers for sponsorships, like Sammy Davis. (Having received money for our own education, we want to pay it forward.)
After Mr. Kristof’s brief but engaging talk about women & girls worldwide, followed by a Q+A, he signed copies of his book. President Tammy Tibbetts presented him with one of our She’s the First postcards at that moment, and said how STF is a grassroots solution to increasing girls’ access to education access worldwide. Mr. Kristof had said that education issues can be solved in grassroots ways, whereas health issues usually require a top-down approach with government mandates (think of what it takes to implement vaccinations).
As we grow, we hope that Mr. Kristof might visit a She’s the First partner program — like Maggie Doyne’s school in Nepal, GiveHaitiHope.org‘s primary and secondary schools, or the Shanti Bhavan school in India. Certainly if he did, he’d have quite a following behind him to Tweet, post, and make his stories go viral for change.
Have you read Half the Sky? Which part had the most impact on you?
