Student Led Massachusetts to Women’s March.

The Women’s March on Washington on January 21, and sister marches across the country and around the world, may have been the largest single day of demonstrations in US history. Of the hundreds of thousands of protestors in the capital, doctoral student Tami Gouveia says 9,700 were from Massachusetts.

Gouveia is the state lead organizer for the Massachusetts chapter of the Women’s March on Washington (WoMaWaMA). “Massachusetts was one of the earliest states to form a chapter in affiliation with the national organization for the event,” she says. Days after the election, “I jumped on board,” she says, and quickly discovered just how big an undertaking it would be.

It began with Gouveia and a small team of co-leads, including alumna Kate Petcosky-Kulkarni (’16). The co-leads then created a statewide organizing structure, with organizers for each county in Massachusetts—“to better execute our goals while many of us are raising our kids and working our fulltime jobs,” Gouveia says. Then, WoMaWaMA got to work reaching out around the state, raising interest in the march and coordinating buses to get marchers to DC.

The organization also raised more than $30,000 in donations, apparel sales, and partnerships with the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts and Boston NOW. Those funds went into 130 scholarships, “the equivalent of three busloads of folks from Massachusetts who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to go,” Gouveia says.

“We were really thrilled by that because from the beginning we were committed to the Mass contingent being as diverse as possible and inclusive of women and allies from different communities all across the state,” she says. “When I got onboard I really wanted to make sure that we were approaching this from intersectional feminist perspective, in that we were inclusive and conscientious of women who have been the most marginalized among us.”

A social worker by training who now works as a program director at ReThink Healthcare, Gouveia says those considerations have been central to her career.

The issues that mobilized millions to march on January 21, she says, are also central to public health, from discrimination and violence to reproductive health and healthcare funding, to the dangers of climate change and contaminated drinking water. “I think that’s what the women and allies who went down to DC and marched across the country are saying, that we need to understand and embrace the fact that we’re all interrelated, and that what impacts one person impacts everyone else,” Gouveia says.

“That’s what public health is.”

Gouveia says her public health training, particularly around leadership and management, also helped prepare her for organizing the march—and for what will come next. “Essentially what we did in 10 weeks was build an organization from scratch,” she says.

Now, “we have 5,600 people on our mailing list, people who are really wanting to be engaged long-term,” she says. “This was never just about getting people to the march and calling it a day. It was always building toward the long-term, and those are definitely skills that I have from public health.”

—Michelle Samuels