Maryland NOW’s 2024 State Conference was held on Saturday, June 1, as a hybrid conference, with both members and guests at our conference site in Annapolis, Maryland, and online. Attendees were required to register in advance so they could be sent an email with a Zoom link and an electronic copy of our program book with information about the agenda, speakers and workshops, the bylaws on which we were voting, and other organizational information.
We presented three workshops: Maryland’s Role in the Big Picture, Abortion Messaging in Rural Maryland, and The ERA in Defense of Democracy.
You can access the 2024 State Conference booklet here.
Maryland’s Role in the Big Picture
The 2024 General Election Cycle has been termed as the most decisive one in our history. So much is at stake. Polls and pundits are everywhere. Three presenters: Cate Gormley, VP at Lake Research Partners, Ellie Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, and Linda Berg, a former political director of NOW, helped us understand how to read a poll and to tell good polls from bad polls. All three addressed the U.S. Senate race in Maryland and polling on those campaigns. This is a very worthwhile 90 minutes to help our activists understand what’s ahead.
Abortion Messaging in Rural Maryland
Ballot question #1 is a legislatively referred consitutional amendment. which would add the right to make choices about one’s own pregnancy to our state constitution. The areas where this needs to do well are Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore. These are typically conservative areas of our state where, when correctly framed and campaigned for, it might actually have a chance of being approved. The problem we face is that we cannot take talking points that work in Montgomery County or the I-95 “Blue Bubble,” and use them in Allegany or Wicomico Counties. We wanted to hear from the women who work on this issue every day in these more rural parts of our state in abortion clinics about their experiences and, based on that, what messages would work. We hear from Laren Hutton, Certified Nurse Midwife at the Planned Parenthood of Maryland Clinic on the Eastern Shore, Rachel Kasky, Chief Nurse Executive at the Women’s Health Center of Maryland in Allegany County, Maryland, Ramsie Kasky, Development Director for the Women’s Health Center in Charleston, WVa. Cresta Kowalski, an activist and NOW member from Cumberland, served as the panel moderator. The recording of this workshop can be found here.
The ERA in Defense of Democracy
Maryland NOW has an ERA Task Force that is the envy of most NOW states around the country. Led by Mary Ann Gorman, TF Chair, has worked tirelessly to bring the ERA within strong striking distance this year.It has been ratified by 38 states and registered in the Constitution by the National Archivist. The panel will discuss simple and immediate actions people can take as individuals and at an organizational level to join the national grassroots effort to see ERA certified and published as the 28th Amendment this year. Our panel includes Ariana Kelly, Executive Director of the Maryland Commission for Women; Stephanie McGency, Founder and President of the Women’s Equity Center and Action Network; Camila Reynolds-Domionguez, Chief of Staff to Maryland State Delegate Kris Fair, with Mary Ann serving as panel moderator. You can watch the video of the panel presentation on this link.
Other conference news
The proposed bylaws amendments were reviewed and passed. State officers were nominated and a motion to pass all three names was approved by acclimation: Barbara Hays, President, Crystal Lopez Peters, Action Vice President, and Jerry Blum as Treasurer. We honored Kobby Hoffman, our Eastern District Director from Virginia who had served two terms and was retiring from the National Board of Directors, with a cake during our afternoon break.
We had over 50 registrations come in through our GoogleForms. and at least 30 of these activists came in-person.These activists came in from all over the state of Maryland. We fulfilled a long-standing requirement we have had for our conferences in the past by offering Child Care to any attendees who wanted to bring their children.
With the way the world is evolving post-pandemic, we felt it was important to experience a hybrid conference for us to be able to judge how we could put on future hybrid conferences. We were able to hire two experienced video/audio technicians to do that work and felt the attendees who were with us virtually gave us good marks. It was also the first conference for which we sold sponsorship ads in our state conference program book which also went well.
