By: Diana Cummins, Manager, Communications, Coulter

On Wednesday, May 8, RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association held its annual Advocacy Day. Where 115+ members of the infertility community traveled to Washington, D.C. from across the country to advocate for two bills that could financially help people with the disease of infertility get the medical care they need to have children.

Before coming to Coulter I didn’t know much about infertility. Do you know it affects 1 in 8 couples? An astounding number given how few people know any specifics about the disease, or that it is even classified as a disease. But in the past year I’ve worked for RESOLVE, I’ve learned a lot of facts about infertility, the emotional and financial stressors those trying to build their family face, and that RESOLVE and those with infertility (wherever in their family building journey) and their families and friends have created a strong network of support.

RESOLVE is one of the clients for which I do communications and marketing work on a part-time basis. I’ve proofed emails, edited their newsletter, worked on national marketing campaigns, fielded requests from reporters, read numerous articles about infertility (with correct and incorrect information), and written press releases. In the year that I’ve worked with RESOLVE, and their very passionate leadership and core staff, I thought I had really come to know the infertility community.

But it wasn’t until I participated in Advocacy Day that I truly felt the power behind what RESOLVE does and what I do for RESOLVE. For the majority of the day I accompanied two women from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the four meetings RESOLVE set up for them in the House and Senate. The two women were so excited to be in D.C. to rally together with over 100 people who are going through the same emotional and financial struggles to build their families and to advocate for their disease to be recognized in legislation.

They were hesitant at first to open up and share their stories with the staffers in our meetings, but as the day progressed both women became more confident, more open, more adamant. And just having met these two women that morning, I was so proud of them for the strength they exhibited in this very exciting, but also emotionally draining day. And for candidly opening up to me, a 24-year-old with thoughts of a family on the horizon, but certainly not today. 

Here at Coulter, we touch the lives of our clients’ members every day. Members join an association for a variety of personal and professional reasons, but in the long run, they’re joining a community of like-minded individuals and many renew their membership to continue to maintain their connection to the community. Advocacy Day reminded me that our work at Coulter not only maintains, but enhances these communities, and for that, although we may not hear it every day, we are impacting people’s lives in a positive and meaningful way. 

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By Erin M. Fuller, FASAE, MPA, CAE, Group President, Coulter

Thanks to my friend Ilana, who writes the ridiculously funny MommyShorts, I watched this Google commercial in honor of Mother’s Day. Like Ilana, I loved the use of YouTube videos, and was struck at how both viral some of those moments were, as well as how instantly universal. The use of user video makes it feel immediately accessible, connected and way less sales-y than a standard commercial.

The commercial also made me think about the role of mothers, and our complicated relationship with our kids and our media.

My kids have rules about screen time – rules that I admit get bent, broken, negotiated and whined about (by all parties) on an almost daily basis. “Screen” sometimes feels like the ruler in my house, which makes me a bit anxious. And so we do “Turn it Off” Tuesdays, and whole weeks, and boardgame marathons, and nights where we read many, many chapters of Harry Potter. We make things from PlayDough and Legos and play with our toy, foam swords for at least five minutes at a stretch before they go back into Toy Timeout. (Seriously. Never more than five minutes.) And we have scooters and an endless amount of balls and things to shoot them into and chalk and helmets.

But, as I always hear from other parents, older kids mean more complicated problems. As my kids get older, we aren’t arguing as much about what is appropriate to watch (they know they lost that battle long ago – thank you Common Sense Media for being the arbitrator of appropriateness) – but how we find information. When my five-year-old airily tells me to “Google it Mommy!” when I can’t explain how a tornado happens – and I realize he fully expects me to do that, as we drive to a friend’s house – well, these are uncharted waters for parents and kids.

We each set different limits – my kids don’t use our computer at all, don’t have access to the Internet, but do play a lot of active Wii games and iPad apps (that only I can download). We have a Roku player, screened currently to TV-Y7 programming. (“But I’m eight!” is the new battle cry.) It may seem like a first-world conversation, but it is a conversation I have a lot with my friends who are parents.

And some Sundays, I like the cozy feeling of hearing the theme song of the cartoons I watched when I was a kid as I read two papers in relative peace, all of us wearing jammies until far too late in the morning. (My attempts at explaining to my kids that I could only watch one episode of “Spiderman and His Amazing Friends” each week at a set time is literally incomprehensible to my children.) We read the excellent Washington Post Kids’ Post together too, and make pancakes and too much bacon. There is a lot of tickling, and a lot of smeary fingerprints on my iPad, and a lot of dancing to the same five tired pop songs that my kids love. (I am raising some partyrockers, let me just say.)

So, this Mother’s Day, I am giving myself a break from the media. We will have brunch, and then we are going to a ballgame – a real, live one. Join me – in both a break from some the routine media consumption and by getting outside a bit.

And if you are buying a mom in your life a gift, think spa. We all have too many picture frames – and who needs those when we have our phones?

Happy Mother’s Day!

Interested in random thoughts about motherhood, women, nonprofits and managing an overwhelming lipgloss addiction? Follow Erin @erinmfuller.

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By: Cherilyn Cepriano, JD, CAE, Vice President, Coulter

Some of the initial media frenzy around Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In has subsided, which seems the optimal time to weigh in with a pithy response. If you missed the buzz, Sandberg, Facebook Chief Operating Officer, has surveyed her colleagues in corporate America and found far too few women among them. As someone who is tapping at that glass ceiling herself, Sandberg asserts that too many very capable women make choices big and small every day that do not prioritize career advancement - pulling them away from the workforce and hesitating on the next rung of the corporate ladder rather than continuously “leaning in” and making forward progress onward and upward.

In my view: Sandberg is right, but not entirely. It is absolutely true that women are making choices that hold them back in big and small ways. So if a mother chooses to take time off to raise kids, then she will likely fall behind her peers on the career track. Similarly, women make lots of smaller decisions that can lead to the same result. If you’re the mom who packs every lunch, takes the kids to every dentist appointments, chaperones every class trip – that is going to add up to distraction from your career, and Sandberg would say that you should share these responsibilities equally with your spouse. On these points, Sandberg is right on some level – all the moments you are not working on some level, you are not advancing your career. But maybe you are advancing something else. Something that is also important to you.

If Sandberg checked my Facebook page (and I’m guessing she can), she would see three major categories of posts: pictures of my son doing a zillion things, check-ins around Washington, D.C., as I work my way around town, and statements I think are witty (you know they are). An audit would show you that the first category outnumbers the others by more than 2:1. See, I want to be the mom who is at every dentist appointment and soccer game, packs all the lunches with a note that says “I love you :),” and chaperones dozens of kids at the Smithsonian – or at least I want to be at as many of those things as possible. I am also a kick-ass executive running a national organization who is proud to be surrounded by others at Coulter doing the same. I could name a dozen women and men that I work with at Coulter and elsewhere who could be Facebook COO, or CEO for that matter, because they are that good at what they do and could move from running a not-for-profit organization to running a Fortune 500 company without skipping a beat. They are choosing not to make that move. They are choosing something else.

So I join Sheryl Sandberg in calling on women to lean in. In fact, I’d say lean way in, sister! But lean in to the career and to the life that you want, to the life that has meaning for you, to a life that you will enjoy and cherish. I applaud every woman who decides that the life they most want is climbing as high on the corporate ladder as their brains and feet will carry them – but I also applaud the women and men who make different choices and have different priorities. And we won’t stop talking about women’s equality in the workplace until we find respect for the spectrum of choices made by women in their careers and lives.

Sandberg makes much of her leaving at 5pm every day to have dinner with her family. That is awesome. But as COO, I’m thinking she could put forward a policy that everyone at Facebook -- and not just the elite C-Suite -- can go home at 5pm to be with their families. Then we would be making some progress in corporate America to support women and men in balancing work and family, and who knows, maybe she would find more female company in the C-Suite as a result.

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