GameChangers Honored in a Fun, Inspiring Celebration

“We believe that this question of leave and care for family is a matter of human dignity,” Ellen S. Buchman said in her acceptance speech on behalf of The Opportunity Agenda, recipient of the Culture Champion Award at the 2021 GameChanger Awards, held again virtually. Buchman put words to what’s at the heart of the work of all of the recipients who were honored during the ceremony. 

Keynote speaker Sonya Renee Taylor showed us how radical self-love can be the engine for creating the societal transformation we seek as well as how essential it is to the activism and organizing work we do. In her address, Taylor shared how although “we come here in right relationship with ourselves,” various institutions and indoctrination separate us from our natural understanding of our self-worth and create hierarchies where some bodies are more valuable than others. This “ladder of bodily hierarchy,” as Taylor put it, helps animate the marginalization and oppression we see in the world. “Radical self-love is the powerful seed in us that births an imagination of abundance, that births an imagination of connection, of care, of power, of resource.”

Following Taylor’s remarks, Be Steadwell closed the ceremony with two songs, including an original piece and a refreshing, dance-inducing remake of The Miracles’ “Ooo Baby Baby,” which was a great bookend to Maya Rogers’ special performance of “Healing,” which opened the show. Midway through the ceremony, Milwaukee and Wisconsin poet laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton recited several poems, including the touching and powerful piece “Working Hands.”

Policy Champion Rep. Pramila Jayapal was both reassuring and motivating in her acceptance speech, as she pledged to keep fighting for paid leave. “I will not give up [on getting paid leave] whether we get it into [the Build Better Back plan] or we have to pass another bill.”

The 2021 GameChanger Awards ceremony was a great opportunity to highlight the work our network of activists have done over the course of the year as well as look back at how far Family Values @ Work has come over the last 18 years. Along with Rep. Jayapal, the GameChanger Awards included these champions in the 2021 cohort:

• Labor Champion: SEIU Local 2015, which represents long-term-care providers in California
• Community Partner Champion: Training Regional Advocates to Influence Leadership Program (TRAIL), an organization, run by the disability community, that trains disabled advocates in Pennsylvania
• Culture Champion: The Opportunity Agenda, which helps rising leaders develop their communication skills
• Business Champion: Gladys Jones, founder of Ga Ga Daycare and Early Childhood Educators (ECE) on the Move, a network of educators in New York City that supports and works to change early childhood education
• Worker Activist Champion: Arlo Hennessy of the Southern Maine Workers’ Center, who’s worked to ensure worker rights for citizens of Maine

Check out the show: