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Published: July 15th 2008
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Obama's office
Me and my group in the Obama staffer's office before they all ditched me! Look at the pictures behind us. *phew* What a weekend! I am completely exhausted but overall I had a really fun time. The Genetic Alliance had the summer 2008 conference, Transformational Leadership, and everyone in attendance considered it a grand success.
Thursday was Genetics Day on the Hill. Basically this day is a way for members of the Genetic Alliance and its partners to send representatives to congressional offices to, in short, get our agenda passed. Since we passed GINA earlier this year (the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act) we don't have much of an agenda left to press, at least not for now. The primary reason for our visits this year was to say thank you for voting for GINA, and to encourage our congressmen and women to support certain types of legislation that will be coming through in the next months and years. Everyone who is participating in Hill Day is sorted into groups by state, so I went to see six different Illinois representatives with six other women from Illinois. One of the women was Joanna Rudnick, who filmed a documentary about herself, because she tested positive for the BRCA1 mutation, which is a genetic mutation that predisposes her to a 90% lifetime risk
Pink
This is a picture of a FEW of the boxes full of goodie bags for the movie screening. It took us about five hours to pack them all (500 total) not to mention the time it took to move them all from the office to the theater and back again. of breast cancer and a 60% chance of ovarian cancer.
We didn't actually meet with the representatives themselves, we met with their health care staffers, which basically means we talked to the people who design candidate's bills and positions on health care. Let's face it, every person can't know every detail about all the policies and issues in the US, so they have specialists, called staffers, in the major areas like health care. We met with staffers for Bobby Rush, Jan Schakowsky, Barack Obama (!WOO!), Rahm Emanuel, Peter Roskam, and Dick Durbin.
I have a picture of my group in Obama's office.
After the Day on the Hill, it's tradition to get the whole group together and take a picture on Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, the interns (including myself) had to leave early to go to another event, so I won't be in the picture. 😞 Sad. But we were all going to a theater called E Street Cinema where we were showing back to back screenings of Joanna's documentary. It was overall a success, although the sheer amount of stuff we had to deal with (goodie bags, registration, etc) was a little overwhelming, especially doing it all
Box of Fail
Me and Sara in the box that used to have a hundred or so pink bags in it, at this point we were basically losing our minds from hunger and tiredness! :) without any breaks. Woo!
We finally got to the hotel around 11:45 and found out that some people's room reservations had gotten messed up, so we finally checked in around 12:15 and then went to bed after laughing hysterically at the absurdity of our lives.
I got up at 5:45 Friday morning to get down to the registration desk at 6:45. Basically registration entailed checking people in when they got to the conference center, giving them a nametag and lanyard and their sweet tote bag. If they were a speaker, I also gave them a lunchbox with some sweet stuff in it. I basically did registration all day Friday, some people got to sit in on the symposia that were taking place, and some people got to nap (raa) but oh well. Friday night was a ridiculously delicious dinner and then dancing to the GINA Rocks band, which included musicians who are also (primarily) people who work for the National Institute of Health, including the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Francis Collins... who is basically the guy single-handedly responsible for decoding the entire human genome. Woooooooo. Dr. Collins actually wrote a song to the tune
Speaker Gifts
Sara modeling the tote bag, lunchbox, and speaker gifts. of YMCA called GINA... see pictures.
Friday night dinner and dancing went until rather late, but the interns generally turned in around 11:45.
Saturday was another early day of registration and then I worked two workshops as well, which included setting up the laptop and getting the AV stuff together, since the hotel kind of failed to do that, and setting up an easel and paper and markers and whatnot. I totally fell asleep in the first workshop, which was basically a bunch of african-american women talking about their various forms of sickle-cell disease. It was not, in my opinion, a very productive workshop outside of that. The second workshop had much more potential, and was led by Cindy Hahn, the founder and president of the Alagille Syndrome Alliance. She started out very enthusiastically, talking about her experiences with the ASA and her daughter who has Alagille Syndrome, and basically talking about ways that advocacy organizations can incorporate youth into their programs, including having youth ambassadors and including young adults on their board of directors. Then, one of the sickle cell ladies from the first workshop took over, and started going on and on and on about her
Knitting
Mary teaching Emi how to knit. sickle cell group. The idea was for her to talk about her organization as a model for using youth in the board and everything, which she did to a limited extent, but mostly she talked about her experiences with the physical pain of her disease when she was a kid... yeah.
After the workshops we had lunch, which was a minor disaster. I tried to sit at the table with Cindy Hahn, because I wanted to talk to her about something, but I ended up having to walk around and sell raffle tickets for most of the meal. 😞 Then I went to this thing in the afternoon called Curbside Consults, where people had signed up to have 20-minute meetings with these two speakers, and basically I sat outside the meeting room and told people when they could go in, and if the people meeting ran over, I would go in and tell them to wrap it up. I did that for four hours, so I didn't get to see any of the other workshops in the afternoon, which was a bummer. 😞 BUT I got to bond with our office manager Mary, who had a knitting table set
Interns!
Emi, Hema, Kate, Candice, Sara, Jamie, Me, and Malia before the GINA Victory dinner Friday night. up and was teaching people how to knit. It was pretty sweet. I also bonded with our tech guy Tam, and our accountant Rihanna, and our front of the office guy Sean. It was really fun.
Saturday night was the awards banquet, which was pretty fun. The dinner was, again, amazing and delicious, although the entire meal stretched over 2.5 hours because between each course was an award. The speeches people gave were really good though, Pat Furlong, the founder and president of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy, spoke and was funny but still very moving. That's a lady I wish I'd gotten to really sit down and talk to over the weekend.
After dinner we had "After Hours" which was basically the whole staff of GA getting moderately intoxicated together on outrageously expensive drinks. This includes a tequila shot with my supervisor Amelia, and a bourbon shot (EW) with the office manager/knitter, Mary. Don't ever do a bourbon shot. ever. Poor life choice. However, the whole night was really fun, bonding with my coworkers and then having a sing-a-long with none other than the great Francis Collins.
That night ended really late, almost 1, but we got
GINA
People doing the GINA dance, trying to make the G, although some people are doing it backwards. to sleep in Sunday morning until 7am which was pretty nice. Sunday there were two speaker panels, which were pretty informative, although for the second one I was downstairs packing up the registration and whatnot so I only got to see one, but it was still interesting. After the whole thing ended, the staff had a debriefing session that lasted THREE HOURS ugh. It was good to get people's reactions to the weekend, although at that point I really just wanted to go pee and take a nap.
Um... I think that's about it. I'm home now and gearing up for a smashing final three weeks at Genetic Alliance. I have a couple of ideas for projects to finish up the summer.
Picture time.
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i see the dani from tila tequila resemblance!