This is the Michigan NOW annual conference. It is a feminist conference and is being held in partnership with the University of Michigan-Flint Center for Gender and Sexuality. Our conference will bring together students, scholars, community organizers, and anyone interested in promoting social change and promoting equality for women.

NOW National Vice president Gilda Yazzie will be a featured panelist. Mira Krishnan will be the keynote speaker. Mira Krishnan is a neuropsychologist, consultant, and public speaker focused on helping the world embrace difference, from ethnic inclusivity to embracing gender and sexual diversity and neurological diversity. She serves on the boards of Equality Michigan and the Association of Children’s Residential Centers, and she has divisional leadership responsibilities in the American Psychological Association, where she co-chairs a committee focused on supporting gender diversity and co-chaired a task force on gender inclusivity. She has been a speaker before NOW MI audiences, as well as a part of Lady Parts Justice events and was a 2018 keynote speaker at the White Privilege Conference.

Panels will focus on intersectionality in practice, and young feminist organizing. Michigan NOW will present awards for Young Feminist of the Year, and an award for college activism.

Topics include:

• Understanding intersectionality

• Social relations and power dynamics

• Grassroots organizing & effective advocacy

Registration opens at 8:45 and the conference starts at 9:30. Light refreshments will be available during registration. Lunch will be served. Registration must be completed by March 18th at 5pm to be guaranteed a lunch. The conference is open to the public. Walk-in registration will be available.

There will be a meeting for Michigan NOW members immediately following the conference.

Parking is available at the Mill Street Ramp on campus, or at the City Flat Lot that is diretly across from campus ( https://maps.umflint.edu/).

THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW)

As the grassroots arm of the women’s movement, the National Organization for Women is dedicated to its multi-issue and multi-strategy approach to women’s rights, and is the largest organization of feminist grassroots activists in the United States. NOW has hundreds of chapters and hundreds of thousands of members and activists in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Since our founding in 1966, NOW’s purpose is to take action through intersectional grassroots activism to promote feminist ideals, lead societal change, eliminate discrimination, and achieve and protect the equal rights of all women and girls in all aspects of social, political, and economic life.