FARMINGTON – Lael Stegall, founder of Emily’s List and other women’s empowerment initiatives, will hold an informal conversation with the public at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 26, in Room 217 or Ricker Addition at the University of Maine at Farmington.
“Social change is really about righting the wrongs, about strengthening the self-confidence and capacity of outsiders’ – women, the poor, racial and religious minorities, gays and lesbians – to successfully develop strategies to earn and gain access to power for positive change,” says Stegall. She will discuss how she has lived out her commitment to that capacity.
Stegall’s work has focused on empowering women. In 1985, she was one of a small group of women who founded Emily’s List, an organization dedicated to financially supporting pro-choice women candidates for national office and governorships. Since then, Emily’s List has helped to elect 56 Democratic members of Congress, 11 senators and seven governors. It has become one of the nation’s largest grass-roots political network and the largest financial resource for minority women seeking federal office.
In 1994, Stegall and Jill Benderly founded the STAR Network to finance the work of Balkan women working ethnic and political borders in the war-torn former Yugoslavia.
Most recently, Stegall has become involved with the establishment of the American University in Kosovo, whose focus on business, economics and technology is designed to meet the area’s development needs and foster economic self-determination.
Her visit to UMF is sponsored by UMF’s Diversity Committee and Women’s Studies Program. The public is invited to participate in this conversation. More information may be obtained by calling 778-7370 or 778-7387.
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