In a debut of planning, the Women’s Association has Empowering Women of Ohio Week, set between Women’s History Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
Straddled in between Women’s History Month and Sexual Assault Awareness month, Ohio University Women’s Association, a newly formed student organization, is hosting Empowering Women of Ohio Week.
The week was formally planned by the Empowering Women of Ohio organization, which is no longer in existence. Madison Koenig, co-founder of the Women’s Association and Student Association women’s affairs commissioner, said she approached Women’s Center Director Susanne Dietzel to see if this week was something the association could use as its “debut.”
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“It’s going to be a great showcase of sort of the intersections of some of our interests as women from across campus at OU,” Koenig said.
The Women’s Association aims to bring together female leaders from different groups throughout campus.
“I think it’s really nice to have a space like the Women’s Association on campus where you can get all of these different perspectives together and you can come up with these really collaborative events that you wouldn’t come up with otherwise,” said Katie Conlon, a junior studying history and a member helping to plan the week’s events.
The week will feature a diverse selection of panels, screenings, speeches and workshops covering topics from professionalism and mass incarceration to sexual assault and women’s history.
Conlon tapped into her involvement with the Center for Law, Justice and Culture, going off its series talking about mass incarceration this year. On Thursday, Samantha Boch, a corrections nurse, will talk about women’s health in the prison system.
“We haven’t talked about gender (in the series), so we took this as an opportunity to have a few events discussing what challenges do women face in the prison system,” Conlon said.
With a cross-section of women coming together to plan this week, Koenig said she hopes these events bring up topics that don’t get discussed normally.
“I hope people will start to see the Women’s Association as an organization around on campus so we can kind of build our membership because we are a new organization,” Conlon said. “I think reaching out to more people will only strengthen us going into next year.”
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