The Careers in Advocacy panel run by Ignite at UCLA on November 19th featured members of prominent organizations within and around UCLA. It included representatives from Alexandria House and Sojourn, as well as an alumnus of UCLA Sexperts, and UCLA’s Professor Wagman. Each woman on the panel explained the purpose of their organization, the challenges of their field, and how they discovered their passion for advocacy.
The representative from Alexandria House, Judy Vaughan, discussed how she had been an activist her entire life. She had dedicated her career to helping women in crises until she eventually helped found the Alexandria House. The House is meant to provide support and shelter for women and children facing homelessness and trauma; ​​it provides transitional housing for women and children, helping them move from emergency shelter to permanent and stable housing. In discussing the work she was involved in, Vaughan placed a heavy emphasis on intersectionality. She explained that she was intentionally one of only two white women on the Alexandria House board. She recognized that she served a very diverse community and as a white woman, she was in a position to learn from and uplift the voices of women of color.
The representative from Sojourn, Gabriela Tapia, explained that she had a somewhat unconventional start to her career in advocacy. She discovered a passion for criminal justice in high school, through TV shows such as Criminal Minds. Once she pursued an undergraduate degree in criminology/criminal justice, she realized that popular culture and even her education put too much emphasis on the perpetrators of crimes and not their survivors. She began working at Sojourn– an organization that provides shelter, support, legal aid, and more to survivors of domestic violence– to help survivors themselves.
Our next panelist, Sriha Srinivasan, is an alumnus of UCLA Sexperts but is better known as @sexedu on TikTok. She discussed her involvement in the #FreethePill movement, which recently successfully got over-the-counter birth control pills approved by the FDA. She explained the importance of social media in her advocacy work, both in her reproductive justice work and in the activism space in general. Srinivasan opened up about the power of social media to spread information and how she got her start in activism by showing up to a peaceful protest she saw advertised on social media. She uses her platform to show the impact of youth in advocacy and to educate her peers on important topics such as sex education.
Our final panelist was UCLA’s own Professor Wagman, who founded the very new public health major on campus. She has a background in research on reproductive health, IPV and HIV prevention, and sexual assault and dating violence prevention. Professor Wagman demonstrated how activism can be academic and research-based. The Wagman Lab at UCLA’s School of Public Health focuses on domestic, family, and dating violence with a mission of prevention. She seeks to educate the public about the risks and warning signs of these types of violence, to empower people to make safe decisions. She also seeks to raise awareness among healthcare providers so they can better support their patients and help them break these cycles of abuse.
Overall, the Careers in Advocacy panel was incredibly informative and quite successful. Everyone in attendance was inspired by the work of these wonderful women and was eager to learn from them. Thank you to our panelists for all the important work they do for our community and for taking the time to speak with us!