((PKG))  PIA – Erin Vilardi 
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((Executive Producer:  Marsha James))
((Camera:  Kaveh Rezaei))
((Map:  Washington, D.C.))
((Erin Vilardi, Activist and Founder, VoteRunLead))

I always wanted to work on women and power.  Being subscribed to Ms. Magazine in the seventh grade, I had a window into the fight that women were fighting but it always felt that it was under the frame around women as victims.  How do we end domestic violence? How do we close the pay gap? How do we look at the different disparities between women and to make things more fair?  And what I always believed that if women were in charge, the world would be a better place.

My name is Erin Vilardi and I am the Founder and CEO of VoteRunLead.

My sister had me subscribed to Ms. Magazine.  She had taken her first women’s studies 101 and really put that jolt in me to be exposed to women around the world, to how the world treated women in return and what could be done about it.
My senior year of college, I was looking for an internship. The White House Project was one of the first cross women’s leadership organizations. They were introducing the idea of women as leaders.  Marie [Wilson] was a cultural icon. She had created Take Your Daughter to Work Day. She had created the Girl Scout patch for the presidency and she said to me the grantees that I have been funding for the last 20 years are the government in exile.  These are the women that should be running for office. And I have taken that with me in launching VoteRunLead as a very young woman, and went from intern to vice president by the time I was finished.

VoteRunLead trains women to run for office and win.  So many people told us those women will never run.  Those women will never be viable.  Gay women, poor women, communities of color, you know, activist women, and now we see them running for office, winning public office and doing some fantastic innovative things at the local and state level.

Probably one of the proudest moments was the Minnesota state primary for District 60B in which Ilhan Omar became the first Somali-American Muslim person to win an election and she is a state legislator in Minnesota. 

((Courtesy: VoteRunLead))

She is the highest ranking Somali elected official in the country.  She is a refugee. She is a mom of three.  She is really embodying that leadership style of bringing the community along of leaving and cutting a wider path behind you.   
What we are teaching is you are enough.  You have the skills, you have the talent, you have the networks, understanding that is within you. You can channel it.  You can put it in the right direction and actually the world is desperately waiting for your leadership.
We know at VoteRunLead that one woman will never be representative of the millions of women in this country, that actually it comes from the ground up.  And so that's what RunLead’s contribution is, making sure that groundswell of women have the resources to know how to run, have women who look like them, teaching the courses.  I think honestly the women of VoteRunLead are what make people hopeful about the future.
I get to see and hug the women who are out there changing the world.  My role is to make other women powerful and I think that's why I've been put on the planet. It's my magic special power, if you will.  You know, and tell women how phenomenal they are, and when you center people who have often been at the margins and you put them at the core of what you're doing, everybody benefits.