The Girl Talk

A Girl Talk throwback episode! This show was recorded live at The Hideout in Chicago on December 27, 2016.
In November 2016, the F.B.I. reported a spike in hate crimes nationally, but most of that racial hatred was directed towards Muslims. The last time things were this bad was in the aftermath of 9/11.

What will happen to Muslims under Trump? And even if he decides not to start some sort of fascist “registry,” what are American Muslims doing to fight this hatred and protect their families?

This month, The Girl Talk welcomes three fierce Muslim women who will school us on what American Muslims are dealing with in this brutal political climate, and tell us how we can support the Muslim community moving forward.


This month, proceeds from the show will go towards helping homeless women in the Uptown neighborhood. We are working with The Healing Corner to organize & purchase essential items to help these women during the coldest months of the year.


OUR GUESTS:

NADIAH MOHAJIR is the co-founder and Executive Director for The HEART Women & Girls Project. For the last seven years, she has led a national team of people to organize the Muslim community and lead awareness campaigns, educational workshops, and professional develop training on stigmatized topics. She and her staff continue to break many cultural barriers and raising awareness about important issues such as sexual and reproductive health, sexual violence and media literacy.
She has worked in healthcare for over ten years in a variety of settings, including, but not limited to research, academics, policy, and community health. In the past, she was a consultant for the Office on Women’s Health (OWH) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, working on a variety of different projects focusing on minority health in the Midwest.

Prior to her work at OWH, Nadiah worked on a research project focusing on improving pregnancy outcomes of low-income Chicago women.

HIND MAKKI is an interfaith educator who holds a degree in International Relations from Brown University. She develops and delivers workshops on active citizenship through interfaith action, anti-racism education and youth empowerment. Hind is a former Fellow of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute (AMCLI) and is currently a Religious Advisor to the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange & Study (YES) Program.

Hind is the founder and curator of "Side Entrance,” a crowd-sourced website documenting women's prayer experiences in mosques around the world. She is the co-chair of the Islamic Society of North America's Mosque Inclusion Taskforce and was an adviser to the Institute of Social Policy and Understanding project, "Reimagining Muslim Spaces."

Hind's work has been featured on Al Jazeera English, Chicago Public Radio, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Economist, The Huffington Post, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter @HindMakki

REEMA AHMAD is a community organizer with experience in political, electoral, and issue-based campaigns. She collaborated with community leaders to co-found Project Mobilize, a 501(c)4 political action organization dedicated to increasing civic participation and representation from politically marginalized communities across Chicago and surrounding suburbs. Ahmad later joined Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Chicago, where she managed the Pan-Asian Voter Empowerment Coalition of 13 social service community-based organizations. Ahmad directed strategic community outreach for the Jesus "Chuy" Garcia's mayoral campaign in Chicago. Most recently, Ahmad managed a state representative campaign in Chicago and the second most diverse district in the country for Asian American and Muslim American candidate Harish I. Patel.


Let us know what you think! Contact us on Twitter @GirlTalkChi or on Facebook @girltalkchicago
Special thanks to the amazing Bleach Party for our theme music. Check them out at http://letshaveableachparty.bandcamp.com/

#NoBanNoWall
Recorded live at The Hideout in Chicago on February 28, 2017
This episode of The Girl Talk highlights women who are resisting the Trump agenda and have been fighting for social justice long before he became president.

Thousands of Chicagoans are currently worried about being deported, or afraid of leaving the country since they might not be let back in. How can we support immigrant and refugee communities at home? What do these new executive orders mean for our neighbors? And what is it like coming to this country from somewhere else? We’ll tackle these subjects and much more at The Girl Talk.

What is The Girl Talk, you ask? It's a monthly show on the last Tuesday of the month hosted by women and featuring influential Chicago women. Though the show features women and femme-identified individuals on stage, we welcome all gender identities and expressions to join us for these important conversations.

Hope you enjoy the show!
Let us know what you think! Contact us on Twitter @GirlTalkChi or on Facebook @girltalkchicago
Check out our new website: http://girltalkchi.com
Special thanks to the amazing Bleach Party for our theme music. Check them out at http://letshaveableachparty.bandcamp.com/

Wrongfully Convicted!
This show was recorded live at The Hideout in Chicago on May 23, 2017.
Seemingly every week in Chicago, the City is paying out millions to wrongfully convicted people who spent years -- sometimes decades in prison. Those who have their lives destroyed by a broken criminal justice system are typically poor and lacking the support system to fight a wrongful conviction. Thankfully, there are women on the front lines working often for free to clear their names.

For our May 23 show, we’ll talk to some of Chicago’s most powerful wrongful conviction fighters. From a lawyer who helped free a CPD torture victim who spent 30 years behind bars, to former host of MTV’s “Unlocking the Truth,” we’ll hear about what it’s like defending people accused of heinous crimes -- and getting them out of prison -- all while trying to change the system as a whole.

OUR GUESTS

Jennifer Bonjean is the owner and founder of Bonjean Law Group, PLLC. She is a seasoned attorney with extensive experience in criminal defense and civil rights litigation. Bonjean also specializes in appellate, post-conviction, and habeas corpus litigation. Her passion and tenacity drives her to aggressively fight for individuals who have been wronged by the criminal justice system. Bonjean works tirelessly to reverse the convictions of innocent people wrongly incarcerated. She is committed to exposing the rampant police and prosecutorial misconduct that often leads to wrongful convictions. In 2014 the Chicago Innocence Project awarded Bonjean the Humanitarian of the year Award for her work on Stanley Wrice’s appeal.

Eva Nagao is the Managing Director of the Exoneration Project, a pro bono legal clinic that works to overturn wrongful convictions. In her time in Chicago, Eva has served on the Board of Directors of the youth-driven Chicago Freedom School, and as a long-time propaganda specialist for Project Nia. She continues to work with explicitly abolitionist outfits like Liberation Library, sending books to incarcerated youth, and the People's Response Team, documenting police-involved shootings in Chicago. Once, she hosted a true crime series on MTV called “Unlocking the Truth.” Eva's grandparents met as prisoners in Manzanar during WWII, and they never talked about it. She strives to talk about it as much as possible.

Deana G. Lewis is a 2016-17 Mellon Sawyer Pre-Doctoral Fellow and a doctoral candidate in the Educational Policy Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her research interests include Black girlhood studies, the school/prison nexus, and youth incarceration. More specifically, Deana is interested in Black girls’ experiences within the school to prison pipeline and how their experiences have been left out of discourses about youth incarceration in general. As an educator, Deana teaches, facilitates, and holds discussions that engage race, gender, sexuality, and education for multigenerational audiences. Currently, Deana is a Research Assistant with the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP) at UIC, where she is working on a report called the “State of Racial Justice in Chicago” and a summer program for K-12 educators.

Outside of school and work, Deana is a member of Love & Protect, a support committee dedicated to supporting of marginalized gender identities who are criminalized or harmed by state and interpersonal violence. She is also a founding member of the Just Practice Collaborative, whose purpose is to build communities’ capacity to effectively and empathically respond to intimate partner violence and sexual assault without relying primarily on police or other state-based systems.

Hope you enjoy the show!
Let us know what you think! Contact us on Twitter @GirlTalkChi or on Facebook @girltalkchicago
Check out our new website: http://girltalkchi.com
Special thanks to the amazing Bleach Party for our theme music. Check them out at http://letshaveableachparty.bandcamp.com/

A Girl Talk throwback episode! This show was recorded live at The Hideout in Chicago on June 26, 2017.

On June 12, 2016, one of the biggest terrorist attacks in U.S. history shattered the LGBTQ community in Orlando. Then, we watched the White House fill up with homophobes while states banned trans people from bathrooms. For years, the fight for marriage equality dominated the conversation when it came to LGBTQ rights. We won that battle, but the fight is clearly far from over.

On June 27, 2017, The Girl Talk welcomed women fighting for LGBTQ rights in Chicago and beyond. From tackling rampant homelessness among queer youth to a civil rights attorney focused on intersectionality, our guests talk about the issues facing our queer communities today and what we can do to better support them.

Also, Jen really wants to talk about lesbian bars.

What is The Girl Talk, you ask? It's a monthly show on the last Tuesday of the month hosted by women (DNAinfo’s Jen Sabella and public education warrior/CPS teacher Erika Wozniak) and featuring influential Chicago women. Though the show features women and femme-identified individuals on stage, we welcome all gender identities and expressions to join us for these important conversations.

THE GUESTS

Gaylon B. Alcaraz is an activist, organizer and champion of human rights. As the past Executive Director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, she worked within the reproductive justice/rights/health movement to advocate for low-income women seeking to control their reproductive freedom. Among the many social justice accomplishments credited to Gaylon, she served as a founding board member of Affinity Community Services, a social justice organization that advocates for the rights of black lesbian and bisexual women in the Chicago land area. During her board tenure at Affinity, she assumed increased leadership roles, across all areas of the organization’s functions including the role of Vice-President of the board, prior to the end of her final board service. She is also a past board member of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health and the Midwest Access Project.

For more than twenty years, she has worked on behalf of sexual minority women, anti-violence, gender equity, health prevention, reproductive rights, as well as race and culture issues. Gaylon has consistently applied her knowledge in practice towards quality improvement, increased access, and by challenging frameworks that do not allow for the exploration of diversity across multiple dimensions when working with, and on behalf of diverse constituencies. These passionate beliefs have led her to advocate on behalf of all women and children.

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois she was awarded her BA and MA from DePaul University. Gaylon is currently a Ph.D candidate in Community Psychology at National Louis University. She has received awards from Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, Northwest Suburban NOW, Choice USA, Chicago Foundation for Women and Chicago NOW for her work in the reproductive rights/health and justice field. The Chicago Reader recognized her as “The Activist” in the 2014 Chicago Reader People edition. In 2013, Gaylon was inducted into Chicago’s Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame – the only LGBT Hall of Fame in the country.

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Aisha N. Davis, Esq., is a fellow at Loevy & Loevy and was born in Washington, DC and raised in Maryland. After attending Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA, she went on to Columbia Law School and the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies for her JD and LLM, respectively.

As an avid student of intersectionality, Aisha has worked on civil rights issues throughout her legal career, including work with Amnesty International, the Human Rights Foundation, Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, the African American Policy Forum, and Lambda Legal. Since her move to Chicago, Aisha has continued this mission through her work with Affinity Community Services, the Pride Action Tank, and as a board member of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance.

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Amie Klujian is a top-producing Chicago real estate broker and executive vice president of SwakeGroup at Dream Town Realty. In 2004, Amie co-founded Back Lot Bash-- a Chicago pride festival showcasing a diverse array of women musicians, performers and artists. Now in its 14th year, Back Lot Bash has established itself as the Midwest's largest, outdoor pride event for women in the LGBTQ community. Amie earned an a degree in politics from Princeton University and a master's in integrated marketing communications from Northwestern University. She's an HRC Federal Club Member and serves with pride on the Executive Board of Directors at Girls in the Game, a nonprofit that helps girls become empowered game changers.

Hope you enjoy the show!
Let us know what you think! Contact us on Twitter @GirlTalkChi or on Facebook @girltalkchicago
Special thanks to the amazing Bleach Party for our theme music. Check them out at http://letshaveableachparty.bandcamp.com/

A Girl Talk throwback episode! This show was recorded live at The Hideout in Chicago on July 25, 2017.

The labor movement is under attack on all fronts in Illinois and across the country. Our governor is like an anti-union Tasmanian Devil, frantically spinning around doing everything he can to hack organized labor to death in our state. Workers and unions all across the city and the state are fighting for fair contracts and livable wages--and facing massive obstacles. With big Supreme Court decisions coming down the pike that could redefine the future of the labor movement, it’s time for a Girl Talk episode that tackles these issues head on.

On July 25, #TheGirlTalk welcomed women who stand up for worker’s rights in the Chicago labor movement and beyond to talk about the threats Bruce Rauner and the Trump administration have on workers’ basic rights--and what it could mean for women and families in our communities.

What is The Girl Talk, you ask? It's a monthly show on the last Tuesday of the month hosted by women (DNAinfo Chicago's Jen Sabella and public education warrior/CPS teacher Erika Wozniak Francis) and featuring influential Chicago women. Though the show features women and femme-identified individuals on stage, we welcome all gender identities and expressions to join us for these important conversations.

Our Guests:
Adrienne Alexander
Adrienne Alexander is Director of Intergovernmental Affairs at AFSCME Council 31, where she’s worked since 2010. She’s better known on Twitter as @DriXander. She originally hails from Georgia, where she graduated from Agnes Scott, a women’s college. After undergrad, Adrienne ventured up to Minnesota where she got her Master’s in Public Policy. Now she’s happily settled in Rogers Park, where her New Yorker husband finally agreed to join her. They’re surviving the Trump years by focusing on their lovely ten month old daughter.

Stacy Davis Gates
Stacy Davis Gates has served as the Political and Legislative Director for theChicago Teachers Union for the past six years. While at the CTU, Ms. Davis Gates has been the architect of bold political and legislative campaigns for the schools and city that all Chicagoans deserve. In 2015, she raised millions of dollars for a coordinated challenge to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his rubber-stamp City Council and coordinated a collaborative effort to pass a voter referendum for an elected school board in 37 out of Chicago's 50 wards. Most recently, she has led campaigns to pass statewide legislation for an elected school board, strengthen charter operator regulations, and fund public education through an elimination of tax breaks and slush funds for the 1%. In 2017, Ms. Davis Gates was elected Chair of United Working Families, an independent political organization by and for working class people and our movements.

Ms. Davis Gates is currently on leave from the classroom, where she taught high school social studies for over a decade. She attended Saint Mary’s College, the University of Notre Dame, and Concordia University. Ms. Davis Gates lives on the Southside with her husband and three children.

Let us know what you think! Contact us on Twitter @GirlTalkChi or on Facebook @girltalkchicago
Special thanks to the amazing Bleach Party for our theme music. Check them out at http://letshaveableachparty.bandcamp.com/

CHOICE
A Girl Talk throwback episode! This show was recorded live at The Hideout in Chicago on January 24th, 2017.

As we expected, our Republican-led Congress is already hard at work not at creating jobs or figuring out WTF they’ll do when they take healthcare away from 30 million people, but defunding Planned Parenthood and destroying access to women’s health care. Cool!

In recent months, we’ve been talking a lot about what we can do in the next four years to support immigrants and people of color, to speak out against injustice and get more involved politically. This month, we’re talking about the very real and very terrifying threat to reproductive rights in a GOP-run Washington. What can they really do, what will it mean for women, and how can we fight back? We’ll address these questions and more.
OUR GUESTS
MARTHA SCOTT
Martha Scott was a member of iconic feminist group The Jane Collective, officially known as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation. The underground service operated in Chicago from 1969 to 1973, at a time when abortion was illegal in the United States. The collective was started to address the increasing number of unsafe abortions being performed by untrained providers who often had no medical experience at all. Since illegal abortions were not only dangerous but very expensive, the founding members of the collective believed that they could provide women with safer and more affordable access to abortions. The collective disbanded after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal throughout the United States in 1973.

AILEEN KIM
Aileen co-chairs Personal PAC's Future Voices Council, a group of women and men under 40 who are committed to electing pro-choice candidates in Illinois, and serves on the boards of CAN TV and the Albany Park Community Center.

Aileen is an Associate with Civitas Public Affairs Group, a values-based bipartisan firm that delivers winning advocacy and public affairs campaigns that touch on some of the most pressing political and public policy issues of our day. Her current portfolio of work includes clients focused on reproductive justice, women's rights, the environment, and consumer protection.

Prior to joining Civitas, Aileen served as District Director for Illinois State Representative John D'Amico where she was responsible for providing constituent services as well as furthering the Representative's transportation safety focused legislative agenda. Prior to that, Aileen worked as a producer for ABC News' affiliate news service in Chicago where she covered politics, national economic issues, and breaking news.

DIANA ARELLANO
Diana is a reproductive justice advocate with a background in community health and global women’s rights. For the past five years, Diana has worked in maternal and child health, comprehensive sexual health education and reproductive rights. She is currently the Manager of Community Engagement at Planned Parenthood of Illinois and a board member of the Chicago Abortion Fund, where she works to mobilize people around reproductive justice issues and policies. Diana loves to work on transforming people’s attitudes and beliefs about abortion. She has trained over 150 people on effective messaging tactics on abortion care and access and implemented a statewide training strategy for PPIL. She also chairs Chicago Semillas, a committee that supports Fondo Semillas- an organization based in Mexico City that provides grants to women-led organizations in Mexico.

Let us know what you think! Contact us on Twitter @GirlTalkChi or on Facebook @girltalkchicago
Special thanks to the amazing Bleach Party for our theme music. Check them out at http://letshaveableachparty.bandcamp.com/

Throwback! This show was recorded in April, 2017, and marked the 1 year anniversary of The Girl Talk as a live show.
What is The Girl Talk, you ask? It's a monthly show on the last Tuesday of the month hosted by women and featuring influential Chicago women. Though the show features women and femme-identified individuals on stage, we welcome all gender identities and expressions to join us for these important conversations.
Though scientists (and people with eyes and brains) can see the devastating impact climate change has had on the world already, our Denier-in-Chief and his pal Scott Pruitt are dead set on gutting the EPA -- and letting big polluters do their thing.

Coming out of a practically snow-free Chicago winter, we thought it would be a good idea to confront the issues facing our planet by bringing on women who have been working for decades on everything from endangered species to contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.

On today’s show, we’ll welcome Nicole Cantello, an attorney for the EPA focused on water enforcement and Felicia Chase, an EPA water expert who witnessed the lead tragedy in Flint firsthand.

Join us, and find out what you can do to demand accountability from our elected officials locally and nationally on these life-or-death issues.

The Girl Talk: Madame President Edition with Toni Preckwinkle
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is the most powerful woman in the second largest county in the United States - and one of the most influential people in the state of Illinois, period. Over the years, she’s bucked the trend of politicians looking out for themselves by being a mentor to local political up-and-comers, including State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Rep. Juliana Stratton and more.
For these reasons and many more, The Girl Talk is beyond excited to welcome President Preckwinkle to the show.
Aside from the pop tax situation, we’ll discuss her path to the presidency, her plans for the future and her role as a mentor to women and people of color in the political sphere.
Recorded live at the Hideout in Chicago on October 24, 2017.

What is The Girl Talk, you ask? It's a monthly show on the fourth Tuesday of the month hosted by women (DNAinfo Chicago’s Jen Sabella and public education warrior/CPS teacher Erika Wozniak) and featuring influential Chicago women and gender nonconforming individuals fighting for social justice. All are welcome to take part in these important conversations.

Find us on Facebook @girltalkchicago , email us [email protected] , and give a ton of love to our amazing friends, Bleach Party, for providing our theme. You can find them at https://letshaveableachparty.bandcamp.com/ . Seriously check them out – they’re awesome!

The Girl Talk: Women Run IL Edition at The Hideout
It’s 2017 and not only do we have a Sex Offender In Chief, but abortion is essentially illegal in wide swaths of the country, our maternal mortality rate is higher than any developed nation, women still don’t get equal pay or paid leave for continuing the human race and there are only four female governors in the entire country.

We’re ready for this nonsense to change, and to do that, more women need to get into the political fray. This month, The Girl Talk will be talking about how we can do just that.

The good news: it’s already happening. Since Donald Trump’s election, there’s been an explosion of women running for office across the country. Organizations like Emily’s List and She Should Run report thousands more women expressing interest in running this year than in years past.

Still, we’re nowhere close to parity when it comes to women in government. Why don’t more women run? What are the obstacles we still need to break down? And what do we need to know to more effectively recruit and support women candidates?

Join us to hear from two women who have run for office, IL State Rep. Juliana Stratton (D-5th) and Friends of the Parks Executive Director Juanita Irizarry, plus the woman who (literally) wrote the book on women running, Rebecca Sive.

We hope you enjoy our first podcast episode! Find us on Facebook @girltalkchicago , email us [email protected] , and give a ton of love to our amazing friends, Bleach Party, for providing our theme. You can find them at https://letshaveableachparty.bandcamp.com/ . Seriously check them out – they’re awesome!

Recorded live at The Hideout in Chicago on August 22, 2017