policies
ELSA MARIE COLLINS
Co-Founder of The Ideateur and Co-Founder of Poderistas Advocating for Social Impact and Community Engagement Elsa Marie Collins started her own social impact and political consultancy company, The Ideateur, in 2016 to “be a part of projects and campaigns that resonated with me as a person and as a mother.” Collins is also one of the co-founders of the Poderistas, a digital community for Latinas, along with screen stars and activists Eva Longoria and America Ferrera.
by Rose Ho
Photo courtesy of Elsa Marie Collins
Some of the people you work with are stars like Eva Longoria and America Ferrera, who are among the cofounders with you in Poderistas. You also work with people in the realm of professional sports. So, how do you bring people in different industries and activism together to work in tandem? I've been really fortunate to work with people like America and Eva, who themselves are activists and advocates in so many spheres. Throughout the years — through our friendship and through our collaboration — you’ll always find yourself in the same spaces and around the same people advocating or speaking up for the same issues. That's kind of how my relationship with America and Eva was — based on engaging Latinas, making sure that we were parts of the conversation, civically and politically.
you might be doing, you have to put in the time and the effort to earn that.” Helping people understand that that's what it takes — that you can't just show up and expect an instant response, but there has to be meaningful investment in the relationship — I think is one of the more difficult things to communicate and have be a reality. But we're working hard to do that every day.
Lastly, what are some of the exciting programs or events coming up? We launched Poderistas in the middle of the pandemic. The original idea was to have all these things be in-person, but we had to do everything virtually at the beginning — which actually was great and served us really well — but now, we're transitioning to more of a hybrid or more in-person situation.
That's true for so many people who are humans, first and foremost, and care about the same things that everybody else cares about, which is their family and the well-being of their community. It's actually been a natural connection because we're really just working on the issues that affect our community most and in a deeper way. To me, it's really just providing an opportunity for individuals to get involved and get engaged and find different ways to plug in and elevate those issues and amplify them.
So, instead of having our Salud y Poder Summit be completely virtual and online, we will be doing it in-person, as well as our Latinas Make a Difference tour. We want to bring it in real life and bring together entrepreneurs, women in civic engagement, activists, and changemakers to have interesting conversations and elevate the women in our community who are doing the work. Women who people should know about and should be talked about in households and have all of the amazing things that women are doing be highlighted.
Can you speak about some of the challenges you and other Latina women have faced in making an impact both inside and outside the community?
We just did an event where we had Poderistas at the White House, which was amazing. As we start to do more in-person events, you'll be able to see more and more of us in different places. //
There's a lot of conversation around Latinas and wanting to have us as consumers of information or of goods and whatnot. And so, I think one of the challenges is really finding that investment into the community. To say, “If you want us to be your audience, if you want us to be engaged with whatever
Spring 2023
the EDGE
57
