CREDO Mobile Blog

Tuesday Tip: 5 Twitter accounts to follow for women’s equality

Looking to follow new progressives on Twitter? Here are five of our favorite accounts to follow for women’s rights. They’re run and managed by women and they discuss women’s equality and many other topics, including politics and Hollywood. They’re provocative, informative, often inspiring and never dull.

Five Twitter Accounts to Follow for Women’s Rights

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is a phenomenon and a force. As the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, she is, after just weeks in office, one of the most compelling people on Capitol Hill. She’s also using Twitter as a powerful tool to advance progressive values and policies.

AOC’s Twitter feed is a direct link to her thoughts at a given moment. In a January interview with Insider, she revealed that she writes all her own tweets, which is rare among today’s candor-phobic politicians – outside of the rage-tweeter in the Oval Office).

“I was sitting next to a public official and I had pulled up my Twitter feed and I was drafting a tweet and she was, like, ‘You write those?’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. Her Twitter account is a captivating daily delivery from one of the nation’s most dynamic progressive figures.
https://twitter.com/aoc

Ava DuVernay

DuVernay is a film director, producer and screenwriter. She directed “Selma” and “A Wrinkle in Time,” which, she told The Washington Post, is about “a Black girl who has no superpowers but ends up doing extraordinary things that she didn’t even know she could – and I relate to that.”

DuVernay is indeed doing extraordinary things. She’s the first Black woman to win the U.S. Directing Award: Dramatic at Sundance, first to be nominated for a Best Director Golden Globe Award and first to have her film nominated for an Oscar. She has achieved success in Hollywood and is now using her influence to change the system so that everyone can have a chance, not only white men.

She tweets on politics, race, intersectionality and women’s equality as well as TV and film. She is also an active critic of the “diseased” Trump regime. “It’s a different era of ineptitude and audacity and misogyny and ignorance that we haven’t experienced,” she told Vanity Fair. “My answer is not, ‘Let’s just support and wait till another four years goes by.’ My answer is to resist.”
https://twitter.com/ava

Emma Gonzalez

Gonzalez is a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, and co-founder of the gun-control advocacy groups Never Again MSD and March for Our Lives. Memorably, three days after the Parkland massacre, she delivered a gripping speech at a gun control rally in Fort Lauderdale in which she called “B.S.” on Donald Trump, politicians in general and the NRA, in particular for undermining stricter gun laws, which are supported by 61 percent of Americans.

Recently turned 19-years-old, Gonzalez is an openly bisexual woman of Cuban descent. She has 1.66 million Twitter followers – more than double the NRA’s 738,000. Her tweets are bold, incisive and regularly call B.S. on social injustice. She is a remarkable young person with an always-interesting perspective on Washington and the world.
https://twitter.com/Emma4Change

She the People

She the People is a national network that connects women of color with the goal of transforming our democracy. It seeks to lift the political voice and power of women of color as leaders, strategists, organizers and voters. And it succeeds. Founder Aimee Allison – author, organizer and one of the first women of color to be honorably discharged from the U.S. Army as a conscientious objector – helped architect the electoral wins that made 2018 the “year of women of color in politics.”

Black, Latina, Asian-American, Arab-American and Native-American women together are the highest-turnout voters for the Democratic Party, but the most underrepresented group in elected leadership. This is changing, as women of color work to transform our democracy from the inside and the outside. Follow She the People’s Twitter account for daily updates on this dramatic and necessary political movement. https://twitter.com/_shethepeople

U.N. Women

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, also known as U.N. Women, is a United Nations body that takes action to empower women and girls worldwide. It works with governments and civil groups to design laws, policies, programs and services that enhance gender equality.

When you follow the U.N. Women’s Twitter feed, you’ll learn about women making vital change globally, like Hajiya Amina Ahmed, a peacebuilder in Nigeria who reaches across religious and ethnic lines to empower women and build peaceful communities, and Apaisaria Kiwori, head matron of a safe house in the Mara region of northwestern Tanzania that takes in young girls escaping female genital mutilation, child marriage, domestic abuse and sexual assault.

Gender inequality is an ongoing crisis in regions around the world. Women don’t have access to decent jobs and face gender wage gaps everywhere. They suffer violence and discrimination. They’re prevented from going to school or to the doctor. They have no say in political and economic decision making. 

But the United Nations is making real progress in advancing gender equality, and you can read about it at the U.N. Women’s Twitter account. https://twitter.com/UN_Women

We also recommend

CREDO funds many remarkable nonprofit groups fighting for women’s equality – and most of them have Twitter accounts that are worth following. For starters, we recommend NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, UltraViolet and the Women’s Refugee Commission. And we hope you’ll search Twitter and discover your own favorite feeds for thought and action on the issue of women’s equality.

Tuesday Tip: 4 Oscar nominated documentaries to watch in the Trump era

We consume headlines, but are we actually digesting the story? In a world where we are bombarded with one outrageous and shocking sound-bite after another, how might we fully understand the impact those headlines and tweets have on human lives?

Enter the documentary film. Passionate filmmakers make documentaries when they feel a topic is not adequately covered by the mainstream media. Documentaries provide an in-depth view of issues we often only have topical knowledge of. They provide a vehicle by which we share the human experience across cultures, countries and time.

In the Trump era of widespread bigotry and prejudice, the empathy that comes from experiencing intimate portraits of lives that we might have little knowledge of is more important than ever.

Here are four 2019 Oscar nominated documentary films we think you might enjoy.

Feature Length Oscar Nominated Documentary Films:

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING
RaMall Ross moved to Hale County, Alabama in 2009 to work as a basketball coach and photography teacher. Once there, he captured moving images of the lives around him in what could almost be described as a visual poem. The study that emerges provides an insider’s view of the lives of Black people in a rural Southern town.

The film centers around Quincy Bryant, a young father working at the local catfish plant, Mary, a woman who has worked hard at the plant for 20 years and her son Daniel, a Selma University student with big basketball dreams, but not the body to match.

Hale County doesn’t follow the narrative structure of most films. Creative visual explorations that employ repetition and confuse linear time are all used as devices to present us with real-life stories – the kind that happen in between the big moments of life and death.

Run Time: 76 mins. Where to watch: streaming on PBS.org from 2/8/19 – 2/25/19.

RBG
“RBG” opens with 85-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg working out at the gym with her trainer. She’s lifting weights, doing push-ups and pulling cables. By the end of the film, this will be the least impressive thing you’ll see, and that is saying something.

“RBG” is a moving film about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life’s work: the fight for women’s equality. Equal parts love story, biography and history lesson, the central theme can be found in the now-famous Sarah Grimke quote Justice Ginsberg recites several times: “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

Through photographs, interviews and unprecedented access to Justice Ginsberg herself, we come to know a committed leader who is methodical and specific in her approach to the law. A woman who changed the course of American history and earned her status as a cultural icon.

It’s almost impossible not to cheer for this film. Thank you, Justice Ginsberg for everything you’ve done and everything you continue to do to get those feet off of our necks.

Run time: 98 mins. Where to watch: YouTube starting at $3.99

Short Oscar Nominated Documentary Films

A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN
Created entirely from stock footage taken in 1939 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, “A Night at the Garden” bears witness to an aspect of American history that is practically unknown: The rise of the Nazis in the United States.

Twenty thousand Americans gathered to cheer for Hitler in the heart of the Big Apple, their hands raised high in the sickening Nazi salute. Some might be surprised this happened in the melting pot that is New York City. What’s not surprising are the familiar tactics used by the speakers – demonization of groups of people, chants to take back the country, and blatant attacks on the press. It is all too reminiscent of Trump’s rallies to “Make America Great Again” and matches the horror we saw in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Run time: 7 mins. Where to watch: streaming for free at anightatthegarden.com

LIFEBOAT
On Sept. 2, 2015, images of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body woke up the Western world to the ongoing refugee crisis on the Mediterranean Sea. European leaders offered expanded quotas and renewed plans to help.

“Lifeboat” picks up one year later. It follows the efforts of Sea-Watch, a German nonprofit organization that conducts search and rescue missions in the central Mediterranean Sea. Over three days in 2016, Sea-Watch rescued 3,200 people migrating from Libya in dangerously overcrowded rubber boats.

“Lifeboat” argues that we can’t help or even begin to solve the humanitarian crisis that we are faced with today in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Honduras and other countries across the globe if we continue to see the people at the center of the crisis as “migrants” or “caravans.” We have to look deeper. We have to see humans.

“Then your heart starts operating more than your head. And your heart tells the truth when you listen to it.” – Jon Castle, “Lifeboat.”

Run time: 34 mins. Where to watch: Free on YouTube courtesy of The Screening Room | The New Yorker

CREDO stands with teachers and students (and show your support with a poster!)

Public school teachers and students deserve better. That’s why, across the country, teachers are standing up to demand better pay, more classroom funding, increased support staff and smaller class sizes in response to nationwide underfunding of public schools.

In Arizona, Colorado to Kentucky, Washington, Oklahoma, West Virginia and California, teachers are walking out or striking to stand up for the future of their students – and they are winning.

As Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois, told the Associated Press, “What you’re seeing…is real enthusiasm and a belief that you can actually be successful…there’s now a sense that you can actually win.”

We agree! Teachers – many of whom are women and people of color – are fighting for the future of their students and standing up to the policies of austerity that have woefully and chronically underfunded public schools. These teachers are putting their jobs and lives on the line to improve the conditions for their students and their fellow teachers and staff, and they work day in and day out to ensure that every child has an opportunity to succeed.

If you’re participating in a rally or would like to support teachers, we have some posters you can download and print at home:

Tuesday Tip: Why the Green New Deal is Essential

The Green New Deal is – finally – a plan with the scope and ambition necessary to transition our society and economy away from fossil fuels and fend off the oncoming climate crisis.

Scientific research is now virtually unanimous: Unless we take drastic action to get carbon emissions under control in the next decade, by the year 2040, the global ecosystem will tip into an irreversible slide toward breakdown. In the United States, warming will devastate every sector of the economy, from agriculture to public health.

The Green New Deal is a plan to prevent this – and more. A proposal by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Green New Deal would entirely transform the U.S. economy, shifting us to 100 percent renewable energy within 10 years. Named for Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that helped lift the United States out of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the Green New Deal is a sweeping program of investment – not only in clean energy, but also in jobs, income inequality, infrastructure, and racial justice. It would give us an economy that is sustainable, strong and fair after our transition away from carbon.

By some estimates, a Green New Deal could create 10 million jobs over the next decade by putting Americans to work on the sustainable technology and infrastructure we need to transition away from fossil fuels. It would reduce income inequality and bring solutions to communities that have been left behind.

Like Pres. Roosevelt’s New Deal, this plan is ambitious – but it is necessary and possible. To make it a reality, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, 45 members of Congress and groups like our allies at the Sunrise Movement – an organization of young climate activists – have urged Speaker Nancy Pelosi to establish a House Select Committee on a Green New Deal with a mandate to create a solid plan by 2020 to transition to 100 percent clean energy by 2030, invest in communities on the frontlines of poverty and pollution, and guarantee good jobs to all who are willing to work for these goals. More than 61,000 CREDO activists have called on House Democrats to support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal.

In addition, activists took their demands directly to Speaker Pelosi to demand immediate action on a new select committee: Hundreds of activists from Sunrise Movement staged multiple protests in the Capitol, the first of which was attended by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez herself, urging Speaker Pelosi to establish the select committee and make climate action front and center in the new Congress. Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi stopped short of doing so. Instead, she established the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which does not have the same mandate that climate activists have pushed for, such as allowing the committee to write legislation to transform our economy in the way that’s needed to prevent a climate crisis.

But CREDO and our allies are not deterred by this small setback, and we’re ramping up pressure on the newly Democratic House of Representatives to pass bold, transformative climate and green jobs initiatives and legislation. In addition, we’re calling on 2020 presidential hopefuls to commit to supporting the Green New Deal platform. Recently, after announcing her 2020 campaign bid, progressive champion Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that she “supports the idea of a Green New Deal to ambitiously tackle our climate crisis, economic inequality, and racial injustice.”

To learn and read more about the Green New Deal, Vox has a detailed and lengthy explainer you can check out here.

If you’re concerned about climate change, here’s a step you can take right now: switch your phone service to CREDO Mobile and your home electricity to CREDO Energy. We fight for climate justice through CREDO Action and donate to environmental organizations that are fighting the climate crisis every day, as well as many other progressive nonprofits. Take a look at who we fund and vote for the organizations you think we should fund this month.