by Gina Welisch, WMSLO Student Activist Grant Recipient
On January 12th, 2019, Planned Parenthood Generation Action Club at Cal Poly hosted a conference, called UnstoPPable. It took months of planning, lots of researching grant opportunities, and a ton of thought went into it.
My name is Gina Welisch, and I am the president of PPGA at Cal Poly. I attended the first Women’s March in SLO, and when I saw the opportunity that WMSLO was providing student activists, I jumped on it. I was honored to be the first WMSLO grant recipient.
The event, which roughly ended up hosting 200 people, was not an inexpensive one. The set-up alone was thousands of dollars. Without the grant from WMSLO, we wouldn’t have been able to host such an awesome event that was free to the public.
Accessibility was something we felt strongly about, and so allowing the option for free attendance was made possible by the grant. We hosted renowned Reproductive Justice speaker, Loretta J. Ross, who spoke about human rights and how to build a movement.
We also had many panels throughout the day, about topics such as immigration, incarceration, and the LGBTQIA+ community, and how they relate to reproductive justice.
We began planning this conference in July, and half a year later, we were ecstatic to see our plan come to life. We worked on the conference weekly in our PPGA meetings with all the members, and then the board worked independently in their free time too.
We had lots of volunteers and helpers on the day of that were immensely helpful. We were also so grateful to have WMSLO booth as a resource at our event. So many people were happy to see them there!