Last week, California Women Lead hosted a free workshop on how to get an appointment to a board or commission as a woman. Two Fem Dems were able to attend this event and it was everything promised: full of useful information and attended by many women mayors, council members and board members who could lend their experience and advice to the next generation of women leaders.
California Women Lead is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing leadership and campaign trainings, networking opportunities, and policy discussion forums for women interested in or who hold elected and appointed offices. CWL’s mission, as women in government, is to inform and educate its constituencies as well as encourage and support women to seek public office.
Similarly, the Fem Dems is committed to helping feminist democrats get elected or appointed to bring our voice into the policy debates that affect our everyday lives. The first and most basic thing we learned from the workshop is that getting an appointment to a board or commission is the first step in getting more women in elected office. So below please find the tips and pointers that we got on how to start navigate the appointments process:
1. Why should women be engaged in the political process? The main answers to this question were that women need to be more forceful because we have different ideas and they are GOOD ideas. The 3 speakers, Kathy Lund, Cheyl Maki and Susan Rohan each touched on the themes of how women collaborate to problem solve, and bring the experiences that men don’t have to the table. Another issue that came up is that women often think they have to be experts at something before they are allowed to have opinions. Women need to speak up – even if our voices shake! – because people also need to HEAR what we have to say. We aren’t just speaking up at these public forums for ourselves, but because our good ideas serve the community!
2.
What do you need to know to get appointed?
a. There are state boards and commissions and local level boards and commissions. At the state level, check out Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s appointments page. According to the speakers, your partisan affiliation as a Democrat is no preclusion to getting appointed.
b. Be open-minded about which appointment you want. You are allowed to select five that you would like to be appointed to. It’s OK if you don’t know the issue area, too. These appointments are learn-on-the-job positions, so you can learn all about the state mining trade or state security guards as you go.
c. Be prepared to give up all your personal information in the application. You will be background checked and once appointed, your information is public. Some women in attendance expressed that it was this giving up of private info that caused them to withdraw their appointment applications.
d. A few appointments actually require senate confirmation, so make sure that if the one you are interested in does, you are prepared to go before the Senate and answer questions on record.
e. Know what the time demands are of the position you are seeking. Some are just two days a month but require a lot of travel, while others are more frequent and in Sacramento. You want to make sure you are prepared to integrate the demands of the appointment, which is very part-time, with the demands of your regular, full time life.
f. For local level appointments, contact your city council member’s office and ask if they have any positions they need filled on a local commission on board. According to the CWL speakers, people who volunteer to fill these positions and be involved in their communities and warmly welcomed by local leaders, and later tapped to run for office.
Having women show and speak for our issues has always been an imperative of organizations like the Fem Dems and California Women Lead. Attending this event reminded me that the Fem Dems, as a chapter of the California Young Democrats, should heed the call to get appointments within the umbrella of our own organization (both the state and national YDs), and continue our work influencing the CYD platform to make sure it reflects issues that feminist democrats care about, too.
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