Workshops

WorkshopsAt Secular Women Work, you will find workshops: both hands-on exercises to develop your skills and facilitated group discussions where you can share challenges and solutions with other activists. You will find panels on specialist topics, with panelists who can help you broaden the horizons of your activism. And when you’re ready for a rest, you’ll find speakers who will entertain and inspire you with stories and lessons from their own work. In between it all, you’ll find a conference full of other activists who want to make a difference in the world.

Ada Initiative: Imposter Syndrome
From the Ada Initiative site: Impostor syndrome is a common reaction to doing publicly visible and publicly criticized work like that done in open technology and culture. Impostor Syndrome is the feeling that you aren’t actually qualified for the work you are doing and will be discovered as a fraud. It is prevalent among women in open tech/culture, many of whom have been socialized to value others opinion of their work above their own, and to do things “by the book.”

Desiree Schell: Measuring your Effectiveness
As Desiree points out in her speaker interview, if you don’t measure your effectiveness, how do you know you’re getting anything done? For that matter, how do you know when to celebrate? How do you know to feel good about what you’re doing?

Jessica Kirsner: Fundraising
This year, the Secular Student Alliance set another new record for fundraising, a specialty of theirs. They’ve raised this money through a wide variety of campaigns and strategies, some bog standard and some…highly creative. Bring a project you want to fund to this workshop and prepare to walk out with a plan: know where to find your funders, what they want to support, and how to make them happy about how their money is used.

Media Training
Are you prepared to interact with the media? If you have 15 seconds on local TV or 200 words in the paper, can you use them effectively? Can you write a press release that gets the important information out about your work or your event? Are you prepared if someone wants your headshot? In conjunction with this workshop, professional photographer Ben Zvan will be set up to provide free headshots to conference attendees.

Other Workshops
We have ideas. We have lots of ideas. However, we want our workshops to be driven in part by the needs of our attendees. Those who buy tickets through Kickstarter will have a chance to recommend and vote on workshop topics.

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