Meet Sarah Jakle MSW, MPP | Executive Director & Founder, DemocraShe

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sarah Jakle MSW, MPP and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I had the idea for a new organization called DemocraShe because after working in the 2020 elections as a National Outreach Director for Field Team 6 doing voter registration and the Get Out The Vote Director for The California National Organization for Women: something was bugging me:

Every room working on elections with me was filled with women. So why weren’t our candidates filled with women?

We all know women are not equally represented in our government. I assumed the problem was because of bias with trouble voting for women. As I delved further, I was absolutely astonished to find that statistics show that women and men win at the same rate. WOMEN WIN. We are seeing a lack of equal representation because women don’t run.

In 2018, billed as “The Year Of The Woman” because more women ran than ever before, women candidates in our own California were outnumbered by men by a four to one margin. In 2022, only 27% of candidates who ran in the primaries for senate, house or governor were women.

As I researched more into this problem, I found a fascinating inflection point: high school is the last time boys and girls think they can run for office equally. High school is the exact right time to intervene to keep women sprinting forward.

Here’s our other key aspect I was considering in starting my own organization: the majority of early political pipeline opportunities are unpaid internships, which means only the people who can afford that opportunity get the critical start on a political journey. Yet every bright, ambitious young woman in this country deserves equal access to these early opportunities.

To attain that, we need to create paid early opportunities because otherwise some young women can’t afford to join, knocking them off the pipeline to leadership through no fault of their own.

DemocraShe could fill a key gap as the only organization that both empowers high school girls to run for office and pays them to participate, ensuring every girl can start in our leadership pipeline no matter income or background. This bold investment could provide the critical early equal access that would flood our future with women from every background, all around our country, running for office.

If we set up an early women’s leadership training program at the critical developmental inflection moment where we started to lose our young women and create a paid program where all young women can join us – there would be no stopping women. And if women actually stepped equally into leadership in every sector knowing running for office was their birthright, there would be no stopping America.

And DemocraShe was born.

So what is our program?

DemocraShe is a nonpartisan national nonprofit. We offer historically underserved teen girls peer led online leadership training programs of intensive 10 week workshops and a series of one day summer intensives with public policy skills to become successful future leaders as well as social work skills to overcome barriers like imposter syndrome that take them off that path to leadership.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
The lesson I’ve learned and what I am most proud of comes down to the same thing: the incredible power and potential of high school girls.

What I’m most proud of was a single decision when coming up with the idea of DemocraShe: that I could not build an organization for young women without young women being part. And the idea to create a leadership team of high school and college girls who would build the organization with me. If I’m proud of anything, it was the insight that working with young women would make everything exponentially better.

And here’s the lesson I learned: they did. In fact, I learned leadership means knowing when to step up in a room and when to leave a room, because just allowing the young women to discuss it amongst themselves was infinitely better.

Because high school girls can’t yet vote, their incredible power often gets overlooked. They are brilliant, insightful, committed, compassionate. We often think the next generation is our future, which they very much are: they are also the right now. Finding ways to hear and encourage the voices of high school girls should be a priority for anyone in leadership.

I’m so proud that our commitment to the leadership of young women has continued with girls who go through DemocraShe cohorts coming back to join the leadership team and lead the cohorts they were once in and help continue to build the curriculum.

I knew working with young women would be important, but the lesson was that it would also be extraordinary and life-changing. I am so much better for knowing them and working with them as we work to uplift their peers.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Honestly, if my best friend was visiting, we would probably sit on the couch and talk the whole time. LA is an extraordinary city with extraordinary places to go: my friends are even more extraordinary. The chance to visit with them and really talk in depth about our life, dreams and hopes would be all the excitement I need. And the two puppy dogs and kitty cats in our house would be the theatrical entertainment

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I want to shout out an incredible self compassion researcher named Dr. Kristin Neff, whose work changed my life. In 2014 I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called psoriatic arthritis which is pretty horrific. With the overwhelming pain and fatigue I stopped working, and in fact was put on disability and told by a rheumatologist I would never work again.

And I did live on a couch, with my puppy dog Max, until the election of 2016 made me desperately want to get up. But I noticed that no matter how much I tried to get up, when I hit the distress of how painful and exhausting it was, my brain would wave me off. At the time, I didn’t know that’s what the brain’s unconsciously trained to do – I just knew there was a dissonance between my consciously wanting to get up and my frustrating hesitation to do so.

But I would not accept this. My country was under attack and I was going to get up. So I immersed myself in study – and found the incredible research and self compassion practices of Dr. Kristen Neff. I started a self-led Boot Camp where I practiced her skills while I was challenging myself to register one voter, go on one canvass, hold one phone bank. I entirely credit her work with the fact that I was able to not only work again, but serve as a National Outreach Director registering tens of thousands of voters and the Get Out The Vote Director activating hundreds of women in California.

Not only am I so grateful to her, her work is so important that it is woven throughout the DemocraShe curriculum (along with tons of shout outs to her to the girls!)

Website: DemocraShe.org

Instagram: @democrasheorg

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-jakle-535617240?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app

Facebook: DemocraShe

Image Credits
Non-applicable, my personal photo