By Alec Clayton
Ti’eri Lino and Elizabeth Satiacum will be honored February 19 as Womxn of Achievement in the 27th-annual event at Olympia’s YWCA.
Lino is the program director for homeless services for Interfaith Works. She strives to ensure our most vulnerable, marginalized neighbors have a place of shelter, safety and acceptance. Along with securing continued shelter for hundreds of individuals every year, she works to address systemic inequalities. She spent the past year revising Thurston County’s assessment tool for unhoused adults so community support spaces provide greater assistance to BIPOC staff, shelter guests and clients.
Satiacum is the Native American coordinator at Puget Sound Education Service District (PSESD). She works with over 350 indigenous youth and their families. PSESD is one of nine regional educational agencies serving school districts, tribal compact schools and state-approved charter and private schools in Washington. For years. Satiacum co-hosted “Tribal Talk Radio” on KLAY 1180 AM with Robert Satiacum, a Puyallup elder. Their groundbreaking radio show made political and cultural connections between Indigenous People from the South Sound and the world.
Satiacum is an activist and teacher who focuses on missing and murdered Indigenous women, tribal canoe journeys, the Stop Line 3 protests (an ongoing series of demonstrations against the expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 oil pipeline), Native American Heritage Month, Indigenous People’s Day, and much more — all of which serve to lift the dignity of Indigenous People, especially Native youth.
Guest speaker for this year’s event will be Gilda Sheppard. Sheppard is an award-winning filmmaker who’s screened her documentaries around the world, including at the International Black Film Festival in Berlin. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film, a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship, 2021 recipient of Project Hatched with Chicken and Egg Productions and a 2021 Impact Docs Award for feature film. She’s the executive producer, director and writer of the nationally acclaimed feature documentary “Since I Been Down.” For more than a decade, Sheppard has taught sociology in women’s and men’s prisons in Washington. She’s been a sponsor for the Black Prisoner’s Caucus and a cofounder and faculty member for Freedom Education for Puget Sound, an organization that offers college-credit courses at Washington Correctional Center for Women. Sheppard is a sociology, cultural and media studies faculty member at The Evergreen State College Tacoma Campus.
Racial justice events program manager Marisa Caughlan says, “Womxn of Achievement is a celebration of the contributions of incredible leaders in our community who are not only making a huge difference, but who do not get honored and celebrated nearly as much as they should because of historic and current patterns of racism and sexism.”
The Womxn of Achievement event is a platform for centering women of color, who have always led change at the intersections of racial and gender justice. Honorees are selected by an anonymous committee of community members who are not YWCA members. This year’s event will be virtual. Those who purchase tickets online will receive login information closer to the time of the event. As has been done for the past 10 years, there’ll be a raffle to win a year’s worth of desserts made by board members and staff. Raffle tickets $10, which helps support the YWCA of Olympia. The limit on tickets is 20.
YWCA Olympia is focused on eliminating racism and sexism to advance the social, political, and economic status of all women and girls. While the organization is specifically focused on racial justice, all activities are aligned with an intersectional approach that places the leadership and wisdom of Womxn of Color at the center. This is done while seeking to engage people of all races and genders in the collective work of YWCA Olympia’s vision: “All people are valued, live free from oppression and thrive in a just society.”
WHAT
Womxn of Achievement
WHEN
6:30-8:30 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 19
HOW MUCH
Free – $100
LEARN MORE
360-352-0593