Our Resiliency Framework
Why does DemocraShe incorporate evidence-based social work resiliency skills in a leadership program?
DemocraShe teaches specific skills based in brain science that help young women successfully regulate when faced with pushback, microaggressions and open aggression. Skills like grounding, self compassion, and gratitude. Not only can they use these skills to flourish as future women leaders and candidates, they can put them into practice in their everyday lives to be more joyful, optimistic and ambitious starting right in high school.
Young women are using grounding before they take difficult tests; they are using "inner best friend" to encourage themselves to strive for early leadership positions. These - parts of an entire evidence based set of resiliency skills - help them not only meet the challenges of stressful high school years as young women, but will be in their toolbelt for a lifetime. To help them go on to lead not only in every arena of America, but know that running for office is their birthright.
If we don’t want hate to knock out intersectional young women from leadership opportunities and running for office in this country, we have to give them the skills to push back successfully on the hate. To not only lead, but to thrive.
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Because those resiliency skills will help women in the key leadership inflection points where they most need them - and to stay on their authentic, radiant leadership journey when systemic forces push back.
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Even though women and men win at the same rate when they run - the exact same rate or higher! - women hesitate to run. The Center for American Women and Politics found that women are more likely to be recruited to run than believe they can do it on their own - unlike their male counterparts. Their work also indicates that women — especially women of color — are also more likely to be discouraged from running for office. DemocraShe attacks this stubborn statistic with an understanding of the skills that will make a woman's brain her ally.
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DemocraShe actively uses these skills to not only address the imposter syndrome that holds women back but also the specific inflection points where women hesitate - and we also give young women the right skills to skillfully navigate those inflection points to get to YES: yes to opportunity, yes to putting themselves forward in leadership, yes to running for office.
Also, we cannot measure metrics of success only through the numbers of women running and even the numbers of women winning: we have to look at the experience of a women candidate and a woman elected official. And right now they’re getting slammed.
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We’ve all seen it. On Facebook in the 2020 election, female Democrats received 10 times more abusive comments than men while female Republicans received 2 times as many.
And that experience got worse across any intersectional identity. In fact, almost 40% of tweets mentioning women and people of color in politics contain harassment.
If we know that’s a part of a woman candidate’s and woman elected official’s experience, we need to prepare her with an emotional strategy just as much as any networking strategy or public speaking strategy. And that’s where DemocraShe comes in.