Voices that Inspire

What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's voices that inspire. My name is Meg Baldwin and I'm the Executive Director of Refuge House. Looking back when I was a younger woman in my 20s, getting started on what turned out to be a whole lifetime of advocacy, that this world that I live in would prove to be so exciting and rewarding and the women who I've worked alongside with and for so inspiring. I think I first got a glimmering of where I might be heading as a person when I was a graduate student in English literature. I was going to get my PhD in English, I hoped, and that was a time of great activism across the United States, actually, of organizing women into labor unions. And I quickly became very involved in the union organizing efforts. When I went to law school, I became much more involved with the lives of women who had been pulled into prostitution. And that work and those relationships with those women open my eyes on a whole nother level of how women are used and sexually exploited in a way that takes over their whole lives and prevents them from really having any kind of meaningful future. It's been the biggest gift in my life that other women have trusted me to hear their stories. And I think the most important sentence in any conversation is, can you tell me a little bit more about that? I'm Meg Baldwin and I'm the Executive Director of Refuge House. Voices that inspire is sponsored by Leadership Tallahassee, a program of the Tallahassee Chamber celebrating 35 years of cultivating community leadership.