For a few hours on Thursday, the Louisville Metro Council’s chambers looked more diverse than usual. The council member’s seats were occupied by 25 women and gender-diverse people from differing ethnic, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds as they got a crash course in local government.
District 15 Democratic Council Member Jennifer Chappell led the session. Chappell, a co-chair of the council’s Women’s Caucus, recounted her talking about period equity when she was a new member and how some bathrooms in the Metro building didn’t have menstrual products.
“We really need to make sure women have a seat at the table, so they can say, ‘Hey, you might have not considered this, but how about this?’” she said.
Chappell fielded questions from participants and explained how legislation is born. A few other council members described their journey to council seats and what drove them to run for government.
The event was part of the city’s six-month Office of Women’s Ambassadors program, which is focused on civic engagement and building leadership skills with a focus on women’s issues and gender equity.
Gretchen Hunt, who runs the Office for Women, said explaining how city government works can make it a little less intimidating. It can also encourage participants to approach city officials in their districts and put forward ideas.
“When you look at a map of this city, you will see neighborhoods that maybe people might look at as lacking, and what we have found through our applications is those neighborhoods are full of women who are leaders. So we have this tremendous resource in our community,” she said.
The program is in its third year. Hunt said it’s helped women build businesses together or make job changes because they have grown in new ways.
“We're looking at a new idea of leadership. We're thinking of leadership not as power over people or not just hierarchies, but we're thinking of networks of power that these women can work collectively and together, and that may look a little different,” she said.
In council chambers, one of the ambassadors, Razia Niazai, listened intently to Chappell’s presentation.
Making policy and navigating the theatrics of male-dominated politics are all too familiar to her. She served on the provincial council of the Laghman province in her home country of Afghanistan.
In 2021, her hopes of becoming a member of the Afghan parliament and advancing women’s rights and gender equality were dashed after the fundamentalist Taliban regime returned to power.
Decades of hard-won strides in gender equality were torpedoed by at least 70 formal and informal decrees by the Taliban targeting the autonomy, reproductive rights, education and employment rights of Afghan women. They cannot leave the house unless accompanied by a male guardian, for example.
Niazai said it was no longer a country for her or other women attempting to change regressive policies that she described as placing “women’s roles back in the house.” She fled Afghanistan as a refugee and landed in the United States four years ago, first in a refugee camp on the Texas-New Mexico border, then Louisville. She wanted to find herself again, she said.
“I work hard to change bad cultures in my community, but when the Taliban came, I thought, ‘If I’m here, what will change? Even I can't say one word, so it's better to go or move to another country. At least I can speak. At least I can talk about those women that are in Afghanistan right now without any rights,’” she said.
She struggled with instability and a bout of depression while she looked for jobs. Niazai didn’t want to settle.
“I would like to be in community with people, help people, make them have their rights. My goal was to change something in the community, maybe even one person, maybe two, maybe three,” she said.
Now, Niazai is a community health worker at the Family Health Center at the Americana Community Center, a nonprofit that works with refugees. She’s fluent in Pashto, Dari, Farsi and Urdu, so she helps newly arrived refugees in Louisville navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the U.S. health care system. Going to the doctor was much simpler in Afghanistan, where they didn’t need health insurance, she said.
“They need health education, sometimes they need mental health education. They need appointments with providers, or they need medication but they don't know how to do things. So we are here to assist them,” she said, referring to new immigrants in Louisville.
Niazai hopes the Ambassadors program will help her build connections so she can help the refugee community more. She said she’d love to be in politics again, but first she’s working on herself.
She said she noticed provincial assembly members and Metro Council members have similar roles.
“They do the same for people and connect people that want to meet us because they need to find specific people to address the community’s problems to them. So, these are the things that I hope for my country, too,” Niazai said.
Applications for next year’s cohort will open this fall.
