[youtube <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO8x1siZJQY>]
Today we celebrate the achievements of womankind. I am proud to be a woman and I owe most of my achievements in life to many mentors and inspiring women who I had the luck to meet and who touched my life.
Among those women, I would like to highlight my MamiTere, the woman who has always trusted in me and empowered me to pursue my goals. As you know, we cannot choose our family. So when we have family that supports and nurtures us, we should consider ourselves very lucky. For women, having a mother who is their greatest support is very special. I owe most of what I am and have achieved to my Mother. Because of my great luck, I wish to share this experience of unquestioning support and most of all trust with other women.
We also need something else, especially when we don’t have this great advantage. We need to focus on ourselves and take courage from our inner feelings. If we don’t believe in ourselves what will we believe in and who will believe in us? It is this feeling of self worth that makes everything possible. I also try to share this with the women I meet by showing them what they can achieve, what resources they have inside, and the awesome things they can do.
Another inspiration in my life is my co-worker Giannina Segnini, with whom I passed the last year in Costa Rica and Latin America. The two of us have been training other women who want to grab this world “by the balls.” We try to be empowering women who can see the best in others and push them even higher. Journalism in Latin America is abundantly populated by women journalists. They are a great part of the living force that is pushing Latin America forward, challenging the status quo, creating disruptions in the system to make things better, and never giving up, despite the difficulties.
Our Chicas Poderosas program aims to find and enlighten the best in every woman journalist, bringing them together with developers, designers and other journalists, breaking down the walls of fear to help them enter what is for many the uncharted territory of technology. We eliminate the fear factor by making technology accessible, by sharing the processes of data journalism, and by tapping into their creativity by using visual storytelling.
For ages, society has focused on the differences between men and women. Those differences do exist. But those differences can be the source of great innovation. We can use those differences to come up with a more diverse approach, to take us to new, unexpected places.
With Chicas Poderosas, we are at the leading edge. Society will take more time to get to the same place. But this is the way to make that inevitable change happen faster. To quote someone whose ideas were so far ahead that the world is still trying to catch up: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” Albert Einstein
Mariana Santos
