On Tuesday, April 19th, Her Campus TCNJ co-sponsored an event with Women in Learning and Leadership (WILL) called Take Back The Night, with other co-sponsors TCNJ Anti-Violence Initiatives, the Women’s Center, Prism, Voices of Planned Parenthood (VOX), TCNJ Panhellenic Council, NAACP, and Project Stay Gold. The event is in honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month and is in support of survivors of sexual violence. The keynote speech featured Casey Olesko, a TCNJ and Her Campus alumna.
Olesko is the Communications Manager with Planned Parenthood of Central and Greater Northern New Jersey. She manages the organization’s marketing, communications and public affairs. When she was a student at TCNJ, Olesko was involved with VOX, WILL, and Her Campus!
Olesko explained that when she was a freshman, she got involved with VOX and immediately fell in love with activism, “I had always been passionate about reproductive rights and health care access, but this was the first time I had really gotten involved and sort of found my voice and started taking a stand.”
Through VOX, Olesko said she began to discover what a vibrant feminist community TCNJ had to offer, and that her first attendance at the Take Back the Night event freshman year “really illuminated some experiences I had back when I was in high school. It really allowed me to move forward.” Olesko also credits this event as the real turning point for her and her activism.
Since that first event, she attended every other Take Back the Night event, joined WILL her sophomore year, and got more and more involved on campus and beyond. “I was really looking for those kinds of outlets,” Olesko says.
Later in her college career, she interned for Planned Parenthood and found a community that she felt happy to be involved with. She worked with the organization that ran the health center here at TCNJ, as well as the one in Trenton. Additionally, she involved herself with the advocacy group that works more on the legislative level – working at the State House and the Capital.
“I just made a whole bunch of connections,” Olesko says. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
When asked about her goal for herself and women’s reproductive rights, Olesko is really looking to make a difference, “I want to make sure that every woman has access to the care that they need when they need it.” She explained that across our country, policies vary and therefore create these patchy discrepancies. Because of this, there are some areas where abortion is practically inaccessible even though it’s “the law of the land.”
She explains that even though we’re lucky enough to live in a state where there aren’t major restrictions, there is still a lot of work for her to do, “That doesn’t mean I can rest easy, when there are other women out there who don’t have the same access.”
Olesko has also set out to give a face and a name to women and there stories, which is one of the main focuses of the discussion at Take Back the Night. “I think that telling stories is so powerful,” Olesko says.
The work that she does at Planned Parenthood also focuses on lifting up the stories of patients who have either had great experiences with care at Planned Parenthood or who have been affected negatively by policy and legislation, “And by lifting up those stories and putting a human face on these issues, it makes it so much more real for people,” she says. “They’re not just a statistic, they’re not just a number, these are actual people and actual lives.”
Olesko shared her story that night at the Take Back the Night event, and said that she hopes to inspire people to consider sharing their stories when they are ready and able – no matter what your story may be.