Month: November 2017

The origin of the hashtag that sparked a social media uprising.

You have prob­a­bly heard of the social media cam­paign that took Twit­ter and then the entire Inter­net by storm just a few weeks ago. Mil­lions of men and women from celebri­ties to ath­letes to us reg­u­lar Joe’s used the hash­tag “Me Too” to high­light sex­u­al assault and give empow­er­ment to the victims.

Many peo­ple prob­a­bly think that “Me Too” orig­i­nat­ed from actress Alyssa Milano, the first per­son to use the hash­tag on her Twit­ter, “’If you’ve been sex­u­al­ly harassed or assault­ed write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.’” How­ev­er, these two sim­ple words were used 10 years before that by Tarana Burke, an activist and founder of Just Be Inc., who start­ed the move­ment after a heart­break­ing yet mov­ing encounter with a young girl. The move­ment is impor­tant now more than ever.

The start of the “Me Too” campaign

While Burke cre­at­ed the “Me Too” cam­paign in 2007, her work with sex­u­al assault vic­tims dates back to 1996 when she was a youth work­er and met a lit­tle girl who changed her entire per­spec­tive. On the Just Be Inc. web­site, beside Burke’s fair share of heart­break­ing sto­ries about the cam­paign and her job as a youth work­er, her meet­ing with a lit­tle girl named Heav­en took an impor­tant place—it opened Burke’s eyes to some­thing bigger.

Burke writes about the time she met Heav­en while work­ing at a youth camp where the girl came up to her after an all-girl bond­ing ses­sion and asked to speak to her pri­vate­ly, “She had a deep sad­ness and a yearn­ing for con­fes­sion that I read imme­di­ate­ly and want­ed no part of.” She went on, “Lat­er in the day she caught up with me and almost begged me to listen…and I reluc­tant­ly con­ced­ed. For the next sev­er­al min­utes this child, Heav­en, strug­gled to tell me about her ‘step­dad­dy’ or rather her mother’s boyfriend who was doing all sorts of mon­strous things to her devel­op­ing body.”

How­ev­er, instead of con­tin­u­ing to lis­ten to Heav­en and help her through the rough con­fes­sion, Burke stopped the child dur­ing her sto­ry and direct­ed her to anoth­er female coun­selor who could help her, a deci­sion she would imme­di­ate­ly regret. “I will nev­er for­get the look on her face,” Burke wrote. “I could not muster the ener­gy to tell her that I under­stood, that I con­nect­ed, that I could feel her pain…I couldn’t even bring myself to whisper…’me too.’”

After this heart­break­ing encounter with Heav­en, Burke, a sur­vivor of sex­u­al assault her­self, made a mis­sion to help oth­er women and girls of col­or who had sur­vived sex­u­al abuse and assault. In 2006, she cre­at­ed Just Be Inc. and start­ed the “Me Too” cam­paign to help women of col­or real­ize they are not alone in the fight against sex­u­al assault.

Why the “Me Too” move­ment is so impor­tant right now

Alyssa Milano tweet­ed those two sim­ple yet pow­er­ful words in the wake of the Har­vey Weinstein’s sex­u­al assault scan­dal, which rocked Hol­ly­wood and uncov­ered more than 30 years of abuse in the enter­tain­ment industry.

The New York Times orig­i­nal­ly broke the sto­ry on Octo­ber 5 with inter­views from Hol­ly­wood pow­er­house actress Ash­ley Judd and his employ­ee Lau­ren O’Connor, who both claim that Wein­stein sex­u­al­ly assault­ed them. In the fol­low­ing days, dozens more women came out with accu­sa­tion that he had either raped, assault­ed or made unwant­ed sex­u­al advances toward them. House­hold names such as Oscar-win­ning actress Lupi­ta Nyong’o and Gwyneth Pal­trow also spoke out about their uncom­fort­able encoun­ters with Wein­stein and how he sex­u­al­ly harassed them. Even oth­er big Hol­ly­wood names such as Quentin Taran­ti­no claimed that they knew about the assault alle­ga­tions long before the New York Times arti­cle, but didn’t do any­thing about it.

It’s not just Har­vey Wein­stein though. Kevin Spacey from the famous show “House of Cards” has recent­ly been accused of mak­ing unwant­ed sex­u­al advances toward male, child actors. Rent’s star Antho­ny Rapp claims that in 1986, when he was just 14 years old, Spacey made sex­u­al advances toward him.

In an inter­view with Buz­zFeed News, Rapp said that Spacey befriend­ed him while they both were per­form­ing on Broad­way and invit­ed Rapp to his apart­ment for a par­ty. As if hav­ing a child at an adult par­ty isn’t bad enough, Spacey, accord­ing to Rapp, took him to his bed, climbed on top of him and made a sex­u­al advance.

“It was a frozen moment,” Rapp told Buz­zFeed. He was able to get away and went home, but as a young boy, he was deeply con­fused at what had almost happened.

For years, Rapp kept this sto­ry buried inside him­self, but as the years went by and Spacey became more famous, his anger about that night grew. “I still to this day can’t wrap my head around so many aspects of it. It’s just deeply con­fus­ing to me,” he stated.

Fol­low­ing the Buz­zFeed arti­cle, Spacey took to Twit­ter to com­ment on the alle­ga­tions and claimed that he doesn’t remem­ber that encounter with Rapp, but that he owed him the “sin­cer­est apol­o­gy” for his inap­pro­pri­ate behav­ior while drunk. Spacey went on to write, “This sto­ry has encour­aged me to address oth­er things about my life…and I choose now to live as a gay man.”

How­ev­er, his apol­o­gy and pub­lic com­ing out wasn’t enough to save his career with sev­er­al staff mem­bers of his hit Net­flix show “House of Cards” com­ing for­ward with com­plaints on unwant­ed sex­u­al encoun­ters against the actor. Net­flix ulti­mate­ly sus­pend­ed film­ing of the show, Spacey’s pub­li­cist dropped him as a client and his planed Inter­na­tion­al Emmys Founders Award has been dropped.

These alle­ga­tions against these two pow­er­house celebri­ties shook the gen­er­al pub­lic, but may not sur­prise many peo­ple in Hol­ly­wood as much. Even back in 2005, Seth Mac­Far­lane made a joke on “Fam­i­ly Guy” spec­u­lat­ing Spacey’s pedophil­ia and actress and come­di­an Rosie O’Donnell tweet­ed that she knew about it as well.

While many in Hol­ly­wood knew about both men, they did noth­ing and said noth­ing, until now.

That is why the “Me Too” cam­paign is so impor­tant right now. It’s giv­ing a voice to the voice­less when nobody else is speak­ing up. While this cam­paign start­ed over 10 years ago, the age of social media obses­sion puts it in the spot­light and gave sur­vivors hope that their sto­ries are being heard.

This Boston College senior is helping companies across the country get better insight into the millennial mindset.

Dur­ing his fresh­man year at Boston Col­lege, Riley Soward was at a cof­fee shop with his friend, who is an app devel­op­er, when sud­den­ly they got an idea: wouldn’t it be inter­est­ing to get direct feed­back from stu­dents on var­i­ous prod­ucts via an app? Sure, any com­pa­ny could hold a research group and ask mil­len­ni­als what they think about a prod­uct, but wouldn’t a stu­dent be more com­fort­able with some­one their own age ask­ing the ques­tions? It’s much eas­i­er for a stu­dent to open up about their thoughts to some­one their own age. While com­pa­nies want to mar­ket to col­lege stu­dents, they first need to know how stu­dents think, why they like cer­tain prod­ucts and don’t like oth­er ones. This is where Soward and his com­pa­ny, Cam­pus Insights, come into play.

From a young age, Soward was always pas­sion­ate about giv­ing feed­back on prod­ucts. He would even e‑mail com­pa­nies with his spe­cif­ic feed­back about their cre­ation. In high school, Soward interned for an app focused on mar­ket­ing toward oth­er stu­dents, which he cred­its his inter­est in star­tups. So, once he got the idea to start a com­pa­ny that gets col­lege stu­dents’ feed­back on prod­ucts, he and his broth­er Stephen decid­ed to co-found Cam­pus Insights.

Soward start­ed small and went around Boston Col­lege and filmed stu­dents giv­ing their thoughts on cer­tain devices. Soward’s broth­er did the same thing at his school in Michi­gan. They would then send out all of the tapes to the dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies so the com­pa­nies could fur­ther devel­op their products.

Now, Soward and his team con­duct mar­ket research for numer­ous com­pa­nies and it’s all done remote­ly via Skype.

“What’s good with remote is it’s pret­ty effi­cient,” Soward says.

Soward and his team con­duct all the mar­ket research from start to fin­ish includ­ing con­duct­ing the inter­view, writ­ing the inter­view script and ques­tions and giv­ing the com­pa­ny their full analy­ses of the inter­view. By using Skype, they can inter­view any stu­dent in any part of the world, so they can pro­vide a unique and diverse per­spec­tive to their clients. This way, they always have “the diver­si­ty ele­ment,” Soward says.

While his com­pa­ny was grow­ing, Soward knew he had to expand and hire more employ­ees to help him run it. How­ev­er, Soward doesn’t hire just any­one to be a part of his team. His goal from the begin­ning was to build a busi­ness that’s sus­tain­able and student-run.

https://youtu.be/13g_Pk6eK1o

“It works because it’s stu­dents inter­view­ing stu­dents,” Soward said.

He took this vision and hired three more stu­dent employ­ees to con­duct research projects. With a grow­ing busi­ness and school work, life can some­times get pret­ty hec­tic for Soward, but he knows he makes the con­scious deci­sion to put his busi­ness before classes.

“In some cas­es, I’ve not focused as much aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, but that’s an active deci­sion,” Soward says.

Soward con­sid­ers Cam­pus Insights as his top pri­or­i­ty, even with the task of bal­anc­ing his busi­ness with school work.

“For busi­ness majors, it’s eas­i­er to learn run­ning a busi­ness while run­ning a busi­ness,” Soward said.

While that’s not the answer that most par­ents would hope for, Soward views col­lege as the best time to start a busi­ness because if all else fails, you still have a diplo­ma to fall back on.

“Col­lege is a good time to start a busi­ness because you have a pret­ty big safe­ty net,” Soward says. “It’s a time when you have a lot of free time to pur­sue what you want to pursue.”

So, what advice would Soward give oth­er col­lege stu­dents look­ing to start their own busi­ness? He remained ground­ed while answer­ing this ques­tion and says that it’s all about two things: focus and execution.

The way Soward sees it, you have to remain focused while start­ing a busi­ness espe­cial­ly when you’re a col­lege stu­dent and have a mil­lion oth­er things on your plate. It’s easy to get car­ried away with your idea and the pas­sion you have for that idea, so you have to remain focused on your mis­sion and goal for your company.

While being focused is impor­tant, you wouldn’t have a busi­ness with­out exe­cut­ing your plans. While a lot of stu­dents have good ideas and can see where they want their com­pa­ny to go, they need the exper­tise to do it.

“At the end of the day, it’s all about the exe­cu­tion,” Soward said.

There is anoth­er cru­cial point to run­ning a busi­ness that Soward stress­es: founders get more cred­it than the work­ers. As a young CEO, Soward believes that it’s not the founders that should get all the cred­it, but rather the employees.

“Look at the his­to­ry of Cam­pus Insights and it’s been the peo­ple who joined the team that makes the busi­ness,” Soward said.

To Soward, it wasn’t him who real­ly start­ed Cam­pus Insights or the one who made it such a suc­cess­ful com­pa­ny. But rather, it was his small team of hard-work­ing stu­dents across the coun­try that have made the com­pa­ny grow from the fresh­man run­ning around with a video cam­era to the well-oiled machine it is today.

As for the future of Cam­pus Insights, after Soward grad­u­ates in May, he says he has no desire to stop build­ing his com­pa­ny. Soward is look­ing for­ward to build­ing a strong com­mu­ni­ty of stu­dents and alum­ni that are pas­sion­ate about his com­pa­ny and its mission.

“My vision isn’t to grad­u­ate and peace out,” Soward said. “I want to build a strong com­mu­ni­ty around this busi­ness that spans across gen­er­a­tions of students.”