Lilly Wahl-Tuco was pregnant and frustrated.
She had returned from an assignment abroad, and was trying to find a project to work on for the few months before she gave birth, but the transition wasn’t easy.
One day on a break, she commiserated with a friend — a new mother who also was not finding work very family-friendly. “We said, ‘I can’t believe we don’t do this right. I can’t believe we can’t do better,’” she recalled. Her friend mentioned a group of new mothers who shared their frustrations, and wanted to do something. “I said, ‘Count me in.’”
They met at the coffee shop in the basement of their office building and shared horror stories. Many were about being unable to take leave to care for their children. “We said, ‘There’s enough of us that are dealing with this that we could write down what the needs are and what the gaps are and start a group,’” Wahl-Tuco said.
They weren’t sure whether they could penetrate the organizational bureaucracy and actually enact change, but they committed to try.
Their bureaucracy is not like your bureaucracy, though. Wahl-Tuco works for the U.S. Department of State.
Read the full article from The Mouse and the Elephant co-founder Eric Ratinoff, and his “A Seat at the Table” co-author Dr. Loretta Brady, at the New Hampshire Business Review.
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