Years ago, Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice, took part in a media training session at the Women’s Media Center (WMC).
Smiley remembers the nearly week-long class at the feminist racial and gender media advocacy organization as fantastic.
A select group of women from diverse backgrounds had come together to learn the best ways to engage with the media. They were small business owners, academics, women who worked for or were starting progressive organizations.
Each participant was there to explore the full range of ways they could share stories about their work with the public.
The class training emphasized the importance of thinking about and developing strategies for telling a story and identifying the right audiences to share it with. Understanding the focus of different media sources served as an organizing tool, Smiley said.. In some ways, it helped her learn how to develop different campaign tactics.
Being able to present yourself as a leader and explain the work you do to the media is not easy, but that’s why WMC offers training that helps women learn to be spokespeople for a cause.
Julie Burton, president & CEO of the WMC, said in a statement that “The Women’s Media Center’s call to action is simple: We want to see more diverse women, hear more diverse women, and read articles from more diverse women across all media platforms. Our Women’s Media Awards honor champions for women who set the standard for what media should look like when it gives voice to the female half of the country. They are role models, history-makers, and inspiring leaders.”
Smiley is one of five honorees at WMC’s 20th Anniversary Women’s Media Awards at the JW Marriott Essex House Hotel held on Thursday, June 5. The event will also recognize Geralyn White Dreyfous, co-founder of JOLT and Impact Partners; S. Mitra Kalita, co-founder and CEO of URL Media and Epicenter NYC; Harvard-based interdisciplinary scholar and author Imani Perry; and Jessica Valenti, the writer/activist who created the “Abortion, Every Day” blog.
Building democracy in our economic lives
Smiley told the AmNews she’s flattered and honored to be named a WMC awardee.
Originally from North Carolina, Smiley, began her career as a campaign organizer and now leads the grassroots Jobs With Justice network. She acknowledges that she had been unaware of the role and significance of labor unions for most of her life.
North Carolina, her home state, has one of the lowest rates of union membership in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Smiley said, “A majority of Black people in this country, we still live in the southern United States, and we haven’t necessarily had access to traditional organizing and collective bargaining. So, when I’m door knocking back home in my home state of North Carolina, I don’t tell people, ‘You have the right to elect a senator.’ I say, ‘You have the right to vote.’ And I think the same is true for organizing and collective bargaining: You don’t say, ‘You have the right to form a union.’ You say, ‘You have the right to organize and collectively negotiate standards at your workplace.’”
Smiley insists that organizing and collective bargaining are pathways to building democracy in our economic lives. “As a southerner, I feel like we can’t actually win a full multiracial democracy in this country unless we prioritize democratizing or prioritize the majority of people in any given workplace making decisions democratically, in civic life and political life. Majority decision-making is actually the key to democracy and that has to happen everywhere. I’m at Jobs With Justice because we are a national network of community labor coalitions that seek to expand the number of people who can organize and collectively negotiate standards for their economic lives –– where the bulk of us spend the majority of our time, at work. We believe that to do that, we have to do it in a way that addresses working people as whole people. So, we center issues of confronting white supremacy and gender inequities. Not just because it’s morally right, but because not doing so will be the key to our defeat.
“For us, we’re not just a workers rights organization, we’re a democracy organization. We believe that organizing and collective bargaining power is the key to building a healthy democracy and part of why we’re in the situation we are today is because we have not spent enough time focusing on majority decision making in our economic lives.”
For tickets to Women’s Media Center’s 20th Anniversary Women’s Media Awards, go to: https://act.womensmediacenter.com/a/2025-womens-media-awards