Name: Ignite’s Anne Moses: Fighting to get more women into political office
Uploaded: 2020-03-13
Duration: 3 min 23 s
Description: Fortune introduces the newest season of Trailblazers.

For a long time, ambition has been kind of a dirty word for women and girls and certainly in the political realm I think girls and women have historically and things are changing now, but historically have had a tendency to not want to declare that they want to do something until they feel like they have all the skills they need to do it. [ MUSIC ] My name is Dan Moses. I'm the founder and president of Ignite. Ignite is a movement of young women who are ready and eager to become the next generation of political leaders, and what we're doing is we train young women really young women I mean young women as young as high school or college or grad school and we're training them to realise their political ambition, to understand how they politically engage in ultimately their run for office. Most people, when they think about elected office, they think about the top 536 seats, right? Congress, and the president. In fact, there are close to 520, 000 seats, elected seats, across the country. Most of those seats are at the local level. Women are only 25 % of the 520, 000 total seats. And so even after 2018 where everyone I was so excited because it was the first year of the woman we'd had in 26 years. We didn't really get that much farther. I started ignite about a decade ago because it was clear to me that if we wanted to change the trajectory, we really needed to start younger and get women when they were at an age And developmental stage and thinking about who they were and what they wanted to do with their lives. Running for office is kind of a tricky thing. It's not a common job. Most people don't do it. Most people don't know how to do it. We teach them the skills on how to do it and how to raise money. How do you figure out how many votes you need? How do you reach your voters who are your natural Constituencies. How do you articulate your personal call to service, why do you wanna run? What is it about your life that makes it so that you wanna run, and why does that uniquely qualify you to run? It's really hard to start a nonprofit when you have zero dollars, zero. [ LAUGH ] Zero, and it's not like startup, where you're starting a for- profit where, not that women have much luck pitching to VCs. But there is no or there was then no such sort of VC, social investment philanthropy groups. So, I really had to like bootstrap it the whole way. That was really hard. [ LAUGH ]. Like so hard that I just don't know what the hell I was thinking hard. I mean, I got it's over, but I don't. A lot of a lot of organizations go under and by the way, we started at the height of the recession. So that was really hard. But I figured if we could make it then, then piece of cake. In order to have really good policy, you need to actually have a democracy that is made up of the folks that represent all parts of your society, right? That our democracy is predicated on having different perspectives of all kinds of different people. And so when you have a democracy that has 80 % Older white men making all the decisions, you're just not going to get the best decisions simply because they only have a kind of single perspective on all these issues. There's nothing like seeing, you know, an AOC or an Ayana Presley or a sharees. David's to make you think things are possible. It feels like there's this potential for a generational shift in leadership that people are overtly talking . about for the first time. I just think. [ MUSIC ] Right now this is the moment to be pushing as hard as we possibly can to get this done. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Fortune introduces the newest season of Trailblazers.

Ignite’s Anne Moses: Fighting to get more women into political office

Women hold only about 25% local political seats.