Building the Movement:

CPL New Leaders Intern Cecilia Marquez

Cecilia Marquez is a sophomore at Swarthmore College. In 2008, she was a CPL New Leaders Intern and worked at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, DC. Since completing her internship, Cecilia has been committed to creating safe spaces for women of color and bringing leadership development to student organizers in the Swarthmore community like never before.

She is co-founder of the Swarthmore Womyn of Color Collective and works as the Multicultural Recruitment Intern for Swarthmore’s admissions office. Cecilia is involved in a variety of other student organizations, including COLORS, an organization for the LGBT community and Enlace, a Latino student group.

What have you been up to since the New Leaders Program?
I helped form the Swarthmore Womyn of Color Collective, a great group of women, and have been devoted to building that community. I’m thinking about leadership development on my campus and how to bring new skills to campus leaders.

Many campus organizations have no sustainability or institutional memory, and [some] spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. I am working with the United States Student Association’s Grassroots Organizing Weekend (GROW) training program to help train the Intercultural Center and Black Cultural Center groups. CPL gave me a lot of tangible leadership skills that other student leaders on my campus have not received, and I’d like to share some of that knowledge [with them].

What was your role in the formation of the Swarthmore Womyn of Color Collective?
There had been a lot of agitation on campus about starting a group [like the Collective], but there wasn’t much energy around the issue.  When I returned to campus last fall, I worked together with other women who really wanted to create a safe space for women of color at Swarthmore. We had amazing responses from women and the campus received us very well. We have discussions about everything from safe sex and sexuality to standards of beauty.

Since then, we have had a Reproductive Justice Panel which we planned through a coalition of women’s groups at Swarthmore. The panel featured Kierra Johnson, President of Choice USA; Mia Mingus, Co-Executive Director of Reproductive Justice; and Aimée R. Thorne-Thomsen, Executive Director of Pro Choice Public Education Project.  The Coalition did a lot of campus outreach to make sure people attended the event. It was completely successful; we used the largest room on campus and the room was completely packed!

How did you decide to bring the GROW Training program to your campus?
When I was a CPL New Leaders Intern, I had a chance to attend a GROW Training for DC interns. It answered a lot of the questions I had about campus leadership. When I got back to campus, I organized with USSA to bring the GROW training to Swarthmore. I am really excited to see real leadership development on campus and to build a movement that will be sustained past its leadership.

How did the training as a New Leaders Intern help you come to the conclusions about the need for leadership training?
As a CPL New Leaders Intern, I learned a lot about my leadership style. I realized that I wasn’t utilizing the people around me, and CPL helped me learn about delegating responsibility. I can organize my time and energy better after my New Leaders experience.

Many people in the progressive movement will choose an issue with no direct action plan to make it happen. CPL helped me develop real tangible goals to make a difference. I gained so much from the New Leaders Internship, [because] leadership training of young progressives is a way to affect mass change. I wanted to bring that to my campus so they can experience these skills to organize what we do in a more effective way.

After graduation, what kind of progressive work do you see yourself doing?
I really want to do reproductive justice organizing and work at an organization that is women of color-focused and driven, and thinking consciously about the way their issues intersect with other causes. Reproductive justice is doing a good job at that now.

I’m also really interested in providing leadership training for people who don’t currently have access to it. There are lots of progressive-thinking people who are not a part of the academic elite. Young people are not only found on college campuses, so leadership training programs can be shared more broadly.

New! Apply Now to Become a 2009 National CPL New Leaders Intern