NORTHWEST INDIANA - Northwest Indiana women will soon have an opportunity to have their voices heard at the upcoming Women's March Chicago. The event is January 20th in Grant Park at East Congress Parkway and Columbus Drive. Ogden Dunes resident Joan Machuca, who is a retired Director of Special Education turned activist, is helping organize Northwest Indiana Women for the event. She also helped organize Region women last year for the event in which women wore pink hats to stand up for womens' rights.
"Last year we probably had, from Northwest Indiana, we had about at least 1,500 people in attendance," Machuca says.
She said about 200,000 people in total attended the event last year and Northwest Indiana established its presence.
"We conducted with a lot of organizations from Northwest Indiana and established kind of a meet up point so that we could represent the Region and we were really energized by the whole experience," Machuca says.
Machuca says she and other organizers have continued to organize in the Region this year. The website, womens121marchonchicago.org says the object of the march is to celebrate the spirit of the resistance efforts over the past year and unite to focus on the 2018 elections and beyond. The theme of the March is "MARCH TO THE POLLS" with an emphasis on empowering people in order to influence the 2018 Election. Machuca and other members of an administrative team have also started an Indivisible Northwest Indiana Movement. The group is set to attend the march.
"There are many other organizations that we're hoping will connect as well and unite," Machuca says. "And that's you know the Black Lives Matter, NAACP, Planned Parenthood, all of those groups. People that are dealing with issues that are you know human rights issues that also effect womens' rights."
She says all of the Indivisible groups will be meeting in front of the Art Institute of Chicago and those groups alone will make about three thousand people.
