The #MeToo movement is a survivor’s movement. And it’s for everybody. I just want to make that point extra clear.
Activist Tarana Burke, founder of the movement,
Tarana Burke took the podium in a hotel ballroom full of admirers and told a favourite childhood tale about the time she was forced to run a three-legged race with a cousin who wasn’t, like her, competitive or athletic.
She wanted a different partner. But her grandfather said: “We don’t leave anybody behind.” And so she lost, but learned a memorable lesson about taking care of those less powerful.
Burke took that lesson into her career as an activist and organizer, especially her work with survivors of sexual violence — work that led her to coin the phrase “Me Too,” more than a decade before it exploded as a global hashtag and a slogan.
Now, Burke finds herself in another race — to get the next phase of her own #MeToo work up and running before the spotlight dims. And an important part of that, she says, is to put the focus back where it started — before Harvey Weinstein and the movie stars and red carpets — on survivors, especially women and girls of colour, who she says have always been disproportionately impacted by sexual violence.
“The #MeToo movement is a survivor’s movement,” Burke says. “And it’s for everybody. I just want to make that point extra clear.”
How do you take a cultural moment with a powerful mantra, and turn it into a sustainable, working movement? That’s what Burke, 44, is concentrating on now, nine months into the #MeToo era. She’s spending the summer working on final plans for programming at me too., her organization that’s housed at the Brooklyn-based Girls for Gender Equity, the nonprofit where she’s a senior director. The immediate goal: Launching a new online community in the fall, full of resources for survivors across the country.
Burke has decried what she called a persistent false narrative about #MeToo. “After all this time, I still run into people every day who say, ‘You’re anti-men,” Burkesaid.
“They say, ‘All you want to do is make people lose their jobs.’ And it just takes the focus away from what we’re doing.”
Burke has been on a head-spinning ride since the day last October, shortly after the Weinstein story erupted.
The hashtag spread like wildfire, and it was quickly pointed out the phrase had originated with Burke. Since then, she’s been balancing her work at Girls for Gender Equity with countless high-profile appearances, including the Oscars and the Time 100 gala.
“Part of the challenge is trying to balance all these things,” she says, “managing this level of visibility and also knowing that we have to do a lot of groundwork.”
Essential to that groundwork is fundraising.
Tennis legend Billie Jean King and TV host Robin Roberts each gave $100,000, and Google has given a $250,000 “Google Rising ” grant. But the biggest boost came in May, when Burke received a $1-million commitment — and plans to raise twice that, annually — from the New York Women’s Foundation.
With its new funding, #MeToo is not only launching the membership-based online community but also developing programming, for later in the year, that will include elements like survivor healing circles. It also plans to spend about half its resources supporting community-based groups across the country fighting sexual violence.
Burke says this is an opportunity not to be squandered. “Millions and millions of people literally raised their hands nine months ago to say #MeToo ... and their hands are still raised,” she says. “Because nobody is responding to them.”