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'Everybody Is Welcomed': A Conversation With The Organizers Of The South Florida Women's Rally

Thanks to two organizers from Broward, Laura Sawyer-Broder and Stephanie Myers, South Florida will have its own Women’s Rally to coincide with the Women’s March happening in Washington D.C. the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Twenty years ago, Sawyer-Broder successfully lobbied for improving airplane inspections, after her grandparents perished in the ValuJet Flight 592 that crashed in the Everglades. They were on their way to see her graduate from Emory University in Atlanta.

Today, she’s back with the activist work. She says organizers are expecting nearly 10,000 people at Miami’s Bayfront Park Amphitheater this Saturday. Reporter Amanda Rabines sat down with her to talk about this coming weekend.

WLRN: Your story is so powerful. How do you tie in that activism into organizing the rally, and what results do you want to see come from it?

That was something I was very involved in, and then I took a break after and haven’t been involved in advocacy since. But this rally is less about the one day event. We’re happy that lots of people are passionate about coming out one day on the 21st, but what Stephanie and I both have been talking about since the very beginning is getting people actively involved in the organizations.

It’s one thing to go on FB and Instagram and Tweet all your disappointments, it’s another thing to get engaged in your community, whether that means volunteering with an environmental group or volunteering with your preferred political party or working in a homeless center, whatever it is people need to get involved.

Why do you feel this rally is needed? Is it the political climate or in your opinion a lack of civil interest?

It’s always one or two steps forward and one or two steps back. Historically whenever there has been a great progressive movement, then there’s a time afterwards, you know, where that is not the case. I know a lot of people were jerked awake after the election and realized people’s rights are now in peril.

I’m saying my generation [Generation X] we never really had a situation where I feel it’s been so obvious that people’s rights are in some serious trouble, and specifically my generation, I don’t feel like we had to jump in and be activists the way maybe our mother’s generations and some millennial generations already have felt. I may be overstating that, I’m sorry my gen X’ers, but I think that this was a wakeup call. I think we all need to be involved as much as we can to try to produce the change that we seek.

Everyone has that single issue that they’re interested in. For instance, I’m really interested in health care, because I am disabled and have bi-polar disorder, so the Affordable Care Act was extremely important to me and my husband, he just had major heart surgery, and if we had not had access the Affordable Care Act we would have not had insurance. So, everyone needs to come on board with whatever is their single issue.

You have non-profits like Planned Parenthood and Florida’s ACLU sponsoring the event. What are they going to be doing there?

All the organizations sponsoring the event are going have booths, and people can go around and get information and talk to the individuals who work with these organization, and also these organizations will have two-minutes to speak about their organizations in front of the audience, so maybe a spark can be lit. Hopefully someone will go home that day and look up the organization they want to start getting involved with.

I was reading that this all really evolved off social media. What did you see on social media that lead to organizing this rally?

I was reading all the posts people were putting up and it was obvious there was going to be a march in Washington, and I innocuously put up a post: Is anyone doing anything here in South Florida?”

I had looked all over and hadn’t seen anything about a South Florida rally. I asked: Is anyone interested in organizing this, and Stephanie Myers, who I have known since I was 13 and went to junior-high [Southwood Junior High] with, said yes.

So, we got in touch and we both wanted to convey the same message. We wanted it [the rally] to be an inspiring day, we wanted it to be an inclusive day. We really wanted to inspire people to get involved later on. And so, it really got started from that, all through social media.

Who is going to this rally?

There’s all kinds of people from every single background are coming, and who are going to be talking. Our key note speaker is Haitian [Marleine Bastien, director of FANM, which stands for Haitian Women of Miami in creole], we have the former president of the National Organization for Women, Patricia Ireland, coming. We’re going to have people from different communities: Muslim Americans, disabled Americans, very different voices giving first-hand accounts on what it’s like here in the United States, what needs to happen in the future and what kind of policy changes that we need to work on to make sure that happens.

What are you standing up for?

For me personally, mental health is a big part of what I care about. I have bi-polar disorder and so, all too often you hear about the deranged person who is wielding a gun and then all mentally-ill people are somehow labeled dangerous. It’s a stigma that’s attached to the mentally-ill, so I think everyone has their issue, everybody has their hook, if you want to put it in such terms.

There is that one thing that everyone really cares about, whether it’s the environment or reproductive rights or health-care or immigration, everybody has something that they’re really passionate about.

If this is about all kinds of human rights, why call it a Women’s Rally?

We did that in keeping with the March in Washington.

How did you and Myers work to make this event open to the public?

We want to make sure everyone feels included. We have a number of disabled people coming, and we want to make sure they feel as included as possible. There’s going to be roped off seating for hearing and visually impaired, at the very front we’re going to have sign interpreters and then we’re going to have a roped off section for people with physical impairments. We really feel it’s important that they’re not excluded from this, in fact we had a story about a 93-year-old great grandmother who is making her way down to the Bayfront Amphitheater to come to this rally. There are people of all different age brackets that are truly concerned with the rhetoric of this country.

You and Myers have made it apparent that this rally is not an “Anti-Donald Trump” protest, why?

I don’t think that talking about any one person is going to do anyone any good. Some people thought we were crazy in that, but we really want this to be about the bigger picture: Where do we go from here? What do we do?

On January 21st there’s very little we can do about who’s going to be president, but there’s a lot we can do about our foreseeable future. So, I think that at that point it doesn’t seem relevant, we need to move on and decide what everyone wants to do to make a difference.

It’s a harsh wakeup call, but that’s what where we’re at. We hope people will get involved, that people don’t think this is a one day event and pat themselves on the back. We really want people to get involved and that has been our message through social media and our website [https://www.soflwomensrally.org/]. This is a call to action and we want people to get involved afterwards because if people don’t get involved then we didn’t do a good job.

How are you working with organizers to convey the message that it is not an Anti-Donald Trump Protest?

Many of the organizers are 501c3s so they cannot be involved in a political rally, so we’ve been really up front with everybody, that this is not pro or anti rally this is a rally about human rights, about women’s right and we don’t think that is a partisan issue.

What do you want people to know prior to the event?

We want people to know it’s an open and free event. And that everybody is welcomed. And we want everybody to hopefully really listen to what the speakers have to say, a lot of these people have been in the trenches working diligently most of their lives, and they’re inspiring in their stories and in their background in what they’ve been through.

We want people to get involved afterwards that really is the bottom line. It’s a free event and it will be safe, people will be checked when they come into the amphitheater, this is a peaceful rally and we’re looking to inspire and to get people engaged.

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