“When I was 14, I became very disenchanted with the adults around me who would sit around and comment on the way they would handle things in our community or our city,” says Go Run alumna Dafna Michaelson. “They would throw out these ideas that sounded brilliant to me and then they would do nothing. I was very frustrated and did not understand. I made a promise to myself right then and there that I would never complain about a problem unless I was willing to work on the solution. This promise has become the guiding principal by which I live my life and has led me to active community engagement.”
Thus started the leadership life of a tireless leader in Colorado who originally came to Go Run with the goal of becoming Colorado’s first female Governor. Since the training, Dafna’s work has taken her across the country and the world. Throughout her travels, she still remembers her main take away from Go Run that, “empowering a woman to know she has an equal need to be heard and to be creating legislation in this country is crucial in ensuring the positive growth that is needed at home and around the world.”
After participating in Go Run, Dafna continued to follow her passion for problem solving in America. Doing this lead Dafna to founding JourneyWoman for the 50 in 52 Journey, a project for which she traveled across America to all 50 states and Washington DC in 52 weeks to find the country’s problem solvers and idea generators. The project allowed her to share the stories of ordinary people improving their communities and received significant national attention from many news agencies because of how it inspired and motivated others to take action.
Today, Dafna is still president of JourneyWoman and has also launched the Journey Institute. The Journey Institute builds on the lessons she learned with JourneyWoman and helps people nationwide translate their ideas into action. She says the most rewarding part of the work she does is “giving people back their power” by reminding people of their own capacity. Just like the WHP’s goal is to ignite leadership, Dafna says, “Knowing that I have helped to ignite that spark is what makes my work so rewarding.” She believes it is important that all people have a voice, yet she spends her time with women because “too often we don’t speak up, we don’t make our expertise known and we quietly run the show from the background.”
How can you translate your ideas into action? Dafna’s advice for women interested in similar work is to believe: “Believe. Believe in your vision. Believe in your ideas. Surround yourself with people who will question you AND elevate you. Stay true to your mission and many will follow. You are needed, believe that. If you get lost, call me, I’ll help you get back on track!”
