Meet Myia

Meet Myia!

Myia is one of our new fellows from the Ohio State University College of Social Work! We are thrilled and honored to be collaborating with Myia this year to build new programming and relationships in our community especially with young people and in school settings. Learn more about Myia, taking a peek inside a brief chat this week:

Olivia: “How have your previous experiences led you to Ohio Women’s Alliance’s work?”

Myia: “It all started in my undergrad experience if I'm being honest. I feel like undergrad is the first instance where people learn about social justice or learn about it in a different way. I think that was the first time I learned about it, not just from personal experiences happening to me or having different instances of microaggressions but actually having words to put to what I was experiencing for the first time. I think it was in that experience of going to college, being around different people, learning new concepts and ideas, and then I was a psych major so I was already interested in how people work and working with people. And so I think that those two things led me on the path to asking myself  what do I want to do? I know I like working with people and I know that I'm interested in helping people. Answering that question led me to City Year, working in a school and working with kids and learning about education and being like, ‘Oh I actually really enjoy creating programming for kids or creating programming, as resources for people.’ And then the Ohio Women's Alliance values everything that I value in my own life, you know, I care about the same things that you all care about.”

Olivia: “What are you most excited about in your role with us?”

Myia: “I think I'm most excited about this program that I'm developing with Erin and Rhiannon. It's a youth-led program so it's really youth-centered and I feel like it'll be really unique to the other programs I worked in because it's literally asking students “What do you care about and how do you want to implement that in your own community?” versus telling them what they should learn or telling them the things they should be excited about or implementing in their lives. So it’s about sharing power with them so that they can do the things that they want to do for the first time, which I know as a kid, you don't really get a lot of that autonomy so I'm really excited to give some of that back to students.”

Olivia: “Why do you think this work (your project) is important for collective liberation?”

Myia: “I feel like when you're centering youth, those are future generations, those are people that are going to make decisions for us. So if we're not uplifting them and teaching them and showing them, how to organize how to get things done, how to make a change, then we stop advancing. Then the status quo will just always be the same. As far as working with the Ohio Women's Alliance, this work is so important because it's proven fact that when women are empowered and educated, our communities are stronger, they thrive. And they're more vibrant. And so I'm just excited to continue to do that work so that we can have better communities and have better ways of life because people just deserve basic things.”

You can continue to support this necessary and ongoing work here!