| Dear Executive Women for Her Members~ I love this moment when the old year falls away and the new year appears. I feel a sense of lightness that I call Open Aperture-- the mind's eye is open wider than normal for a brief period, allowing more light to flood in. Allowing possibility to hang in the air without the encumbrance of grinding routine and foregone conclusions. You have to grab onto this time. You have to notice the aperture has widened because this moment is very brief and will be swept away by daily concerns soon enough. Perhaps by Tuesday or Wednesday-- or even sooner. Here are some Open Aperture thoughts to get us started on 2017. First, let's close out 2016 2016 was a glorious year that ended so badly. While I was often nervous and biting my nails about our chances of winning the primaries and then the presidency, in my heart I always believed we would win. How wrong that belief was has shaken me to my core. We are all bitter about the way we lost--by winning 2.8 million more votes but losing the electoral college! Losing to such a deplorable candidate makes it unbearable. Remembering the Gore/Bush election gives historical context to our panic because the consequences of that loss were MUCH worse than we even feared. So I cling to the other side of 2016--that so much of it was glorious. How Executive Women for Hillary brought women out of their offices and cubes to join the political process. How we learned the details and machinations of electing candidates. How we reached deep into our talent pool and our enormous skill sets to get so much done over such a wide swath of the country. How our networks really worked to pull so many women into the group. How generous our members were with their time, abilities, money, energy, spirit. 2016 was a glorious year until November 8. Goodbye. 2017 I've been thinking about the saying "Grow where you are planted." We are now planted in this frightful garden where a crude man who is unqualified and holds dangerous views has been elected to such power-- with the help of a hostile foreign government. This is where we are planted. We can turn away and go back to our offices and our cubes and ignore the frightful garden. I have been working hard to ignore it as much as I can. Watching the first season of Good Girls Revolt on Amazon Prime kept me sane for a week or so. I highly recommend it. But the garden will just keep growing and we ignore it at our peril. So instead we can grow right here in 2017. Grow our network. Grow our skills. Grow our influence. We are all volunteers, so our pace of growth will match our level of commitment. We will need to make very specific choices of how we grow, what we take on, what we leave to others, what we commit to doing, who we support. Here's where we are starting on Day 1 of 2017. First steps in 2017 1. EW4Her is encouraging our members to attend the Women's March on Washington on January 21 or one of the many marches in cities near you. This is the link to the official sign up for the Women's March on Washington. You need to sign up if you are going so that you have a ticket. It's free to sign up: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/womens-march-on-washington-official-tickets-29428287801 And here's the latest information on the sister marches in various cities: https://www.womensmarch.com/sister-marches/ Here's the sign up for the Women's March on Washington in New York City:https://www.eventbrite.com/e/womens-march-on-nyc-tickets-29464021682 2. Our new training is ready. We're calling it Getting to Action: The First 100 Days. We will be giving the GTA training in our first web seminar of 2017 during the second week of January. This training begins with our feelings about what happened and pivots to the future. We've given it several times to much acclaim. If finding a way to move ahead in 2017 sounds good please join us. Click on this link to sign up for the training: Send me information on the GTA Training! We will send time, date and call in details to you next week. So look through your open aperture. Think about what you want to do to grow in this garden that has been planted against our wishes. This garden that needs us to protect all we have been growing in our garden of possibilities our whole lives. You can respond to this e mail with your comments if you'd like to share your thoughts. We are wishing a Happy New Year to you, your families and your communities. Carol Evans and the Executive Women for Her co-chairs: Sherrye Henry, Jennifer Allyn, Betty Spence and Rachel Cheeks Givan ### JAnuary2, 2017 |