We interviewed A’shanti Gholar, President of Emerge and founder of the Brown Girl’s Guide to Politics. She shared her journey from watching debates on CSAN as a kid to her current position at EMERGE

Watching debates on CSAN as a kid to becoming the head of the only organization dedicated to recruiting and training Democratic women to run. 

Throughout her career she has focused on helping women, “the base of the Democratic Party,” she says, despite this being the case, women do not hold a proportional number of elected offices. She also shared how “Brown Girl’s Guide to Politics”, came to be. Staring as blog series titled “Being the Only Black Girl in the Room,” the project grew into a podcast after many women of color reached out eventually leading to not just a resource but a safe space to help Black and Brown women navigate the political world.

A’shanti’s approach to life and work is centered around empathy and collaboration which shines through in her advice and practices.

The conversation reflected encouraging shifts in how we navigate an ever-evolving, high-stress field like politics while keeping sight of the reasons we got involved in the first place.