Many thanks to our second cohort of blog correspondents this year. They tackled topics like reproductive rights, school dress codes, slut shaming, hitchhiking, the generational divide, how technology can help street harassment happen, and several of them conducted interviews with street harassment activists in their community.
Meet the Correspondents of the Third Cohort of 2015
Eve Aronson, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Eve is the Director of Hollaback! Amsterdam and dedicates her time to raising awareness and assessing policy on street harassment in the Netherlands and beyond. Her recent work, “Psst Schatje!: Street Harassment in Amsterdam, Online and Beyond” provides a critical analysis of the street harassment landscape in the Netherlands and explores innovative, digital solutions to the problem. Driven by a passion to bring light to human rights abuses and different forms of gender-based violence, Eve devotes her time to shedding light on and combatting street harassment and human trafficking through her non-profit work, previous work as a journalist and on- and offline activism. Originally from the U.S., Eve recently completed a dual Masters program in Women and Gender Studies in the Netherlands and in Hungary. She is an avid backpacker and lover of languages. Follow Eve on Twitter at @evearonson or learn more about her here.
Meghna Bhat, Chicago, USA
Meghna is a doctoral candidate in the Criminology, Law, and Justice program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a specialization in Gender and Women Studies. She is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses on representations of violence against women in a widely viewed form of Indian popular culture, Bollywood cinema. Having grown up in the metropolitan city of Mumbai (India) and having lived in the USA for 11 years, Meghna has witnessed and experienced gender-based oppression, including street harassment, from an early age. As a South Asian woman, these unsettling experiences motivated her to pursue this field and be an outspoken advocate for LGBTQI rights, prevention of hate crimes and discrimination, de-stigmatization of mental health taboos, and finding resources and safe spaces for survivors of gender-based violence. Meghna finds painting, walking by the lake, photography, traveling, and dance therapeutic for self-care.
Chelsea Cloud, Michigan, USA
Chelsea is a full-time sales assistant for an advertising company in West Michigan and a part-time Graphic Design student. She is proud to call herself a feminist and feels passionately about speaking up for women’s rights. In the past few years, Chelsea has developed a habit of running (and actually enjoying it sometimes.) Her experiences with street harassment while out on her runs have prompted her to advocate through writing. Her passion for writing started at a very early age, when she discovered the power of words and how even a simple poem can unite and empower. Chelsea loves otters, adventures, reading YA fiction and The Walking Dead. You can find her on twitter @LitSmitten.
Sara Conklin, Washington, DC, USA
Sara is currently living, working, and dancing her way through Washington, DC. With an apparent aversion to land-locked states, Sara has lived in Boston, Miami, San Francisco, and Jacksonville. She professionally works in fundraising events, at an organization that empowers women who face homelessness through recovery, wellness training, and housing. Feeling constantly inspired at work by the tremendous amount of strength from these women, Sara chose to write for Stop Street Harassment to encourage dialogue and to help provide a space of empowerment for anyone facing harassment. In her personal life, Sara is an avid traveler and will have touched down on 6 continents as of October 2015 and plans to play with the penguins on Antarctica sometime in the near future. She runs her own photography company (saraconklinphotography.com) and a popular website that seeks to connect the world through pictures, sarapose.com.
Maryah Converse, New York City, USA
Maryah has an MA in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and was a Fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo. She lived three blocks from Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution, an intriguing, unexpected utopia from street harassment. When that utopia abruptly ended, she became interested in understanding street harassment. She works for the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, a liberal religious tradition deeply invested in social justice work, where she has provided particular leadership in the Racial Justice Initiative. She is especially interested in the ways that the activism of Black Lives Matter intersects with global justice movements for LGBT communities, disability rights, environmental protection, reproductive rights, gender equality, economic justice and Middle East peace. She also translates, teaches Arabic and writes memoir about her experiences living in Jordan and Egypt; occasional excerpts appear in her blog “Arabs I’ve Known.”
Larisa Marina Cristea, Romania
Larisa is a master’s student in Marketing and Advertising, with a newly discovered passion for feminism and gender equality. She has volunteered with institutionalized youth and co-founded the “Drawing your future” NGO. She tends to consider herself a people lover and a pacifist. She has been writing fiction stories since she was 12. She loves reading good books – usually fiction, and afterwards fantasizes about the beautiful places in the books, wondering if she will ever get there. That’s why another passion she has is travelling and meeting new people. She loves to hear their stories, learn their way of thinking and acting and then, share what she’s learned with others. She feels inspired by music, feeling more confident and able to write better. She likes the little things in life, including spending quality time with good, enriching and inspiring people.
Roxana Geru, Romania
Roxana is a 21-year-old who is studying psychology. She plans to do a master’s program in Sexuality and Gender Studies. She hopes to one day work within the LGBT community, with sexual workers and/or with people who are suffering from sexuality disorders. She enjoys volunteering and traveling. She likes to fight for human rights, because she truly believes that you should not punish or bully someone just because they different from you and also, because she wants to see a safe and fair world for the next generations. She recently had the chance to study in France for a semester and then received a scholarship to study at a summer school in Denmark. This changed her thinking: she had fear when she walked down the streets in France and Denmark, but in Denmark you really should not be worried. This helped her realize how stupid it is for her as a human to be afraid.
Hannah Rose Johnson, USA
Hannah Rose often feels like she’s floating through a slow, bright fog. In school she studied a collage of sociology, gender studies, art and writing. She has tea bags of feminism, queerness, madness, and longing steeped inside of herself. You can check her out on the collaborative artistic poetic sound project HotBox Utopia. Hannah will be writing from Tucson, Arizona and Lewiston, Maine (US) as she transitions from the Southwest to the Northeast for a career in sexual violence prevention and advocacy at the college level.
Fasiha Khan, Pakistan
Even with the background in Finance studies, Fasiha realized that she has a love for writing! She decided to do something productive and got a chance to be a Contributor for UN Women Asia & the Pacific. She writes about gender-related issues, mainly gender equality, sexual harassment, and economic empowerment of women. She is playing her part towards the betterment of women in the region and around the globe. She also serves as the Global Champion with UN Women’s program, Empower Women, which focuses on Women’s Economic Empowerment. They are aiming to make working norms equal & justifiable for the women & also highlight the female entrepreneurs who have worked against all the odds. Plus, they also help the institutions and governing bodies to devise better policies for women of the world. With Stop Street Harassment, she looks forward to writing to create awareness so we can work to build a healthy and safer society for women. She loves music, reading, writing and traveling. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter, @FasihaFarrukh
Marinella Matejčić, Croatia 
Marinella is a freelance journalist/writer, feminist activist, and soon-to-be administrative law student. Her feminist work is mostly oriented on sexual and reproductive health and rights and she is enrolled in the Women Deliver Young Leaders program. Marinella writes for Croatian portal on gender, sex and democracy called Libela.org and covers CEE stories for globalvoicesonline.org. Her favourite pastime is reading and discussing the essence of life with her eight-year-old daughter. Feel free to follow her on Twitter @mmatejci.
Smriti RDN Neupane, Nepal
Smriti is a feminist who dreams of a world filled with love, kindness and justice. She wishes that the world were a home without any boundaries. 
She is an optimist and believes that every little thing we do matters. She coordinated Safe cities campaign in Nepal with a team of feminist activists of various organisations, networks and community groups from 2011 to 2014 and is still voluntarily engaged with it. She has been a part of the multi country research team pertaining to women’s engagement in unpaid care work. She advocates for recognition, reduction and redistribution of work burden of women to increase women’s representation at all levels. She is currently engaged in an action research and advocacy on women’s leadership in climate change adaptation focusing on women’s time use. Doing workshops and facilitating training with women and girls on women’s rights issues gives her energy and the drive to work on. She also believes that children and youth are the agents of change that we want to see in our world and engages with them whenever she gets an opportunity. She loves to read and write and has a blog which she intends to make active.
Sara Rigon, Italy
Sara is a registered General Practitioner in Italy and New Zealand; she also collaborates with NGOs that offer 
medical health care to migrants. A women’s right activist, she is the founder and current lead of the newly established Equally Different group within the European Junior General Practitioners Organization, the Vasco da Gama Movement, branch of the World Organization of Family Doctors. The VdGM Equally Different group tackles gender inequalities in everyday life. We fight conventional stereotypes and gender roles as built-in components of our culture and foundation of prejudice as well as gender violence. The group also collaborates with the VdGM Violence Against Women group to raise awareness on this tragic epidemic phenomenon. When she is not working Sara enjoys making and eating pizza, travelling and twitting @rgn_sr.
Takeallah Serena Rivera, Seattle, USA
Takeallah is a 25-year old queer/Afro-Latinx/Indigenous feminist activist, freelance writer, community organizer, mama, comic book nerd, and wanderlust; her efforts are usually focused on anti-poverty and anti-racism work, 
domestic violence and sexual assault awareness, and reproductive, sexual, and maternal health. She is currently pursuing degrees in Education, with hopes of becoming a High Science/English/ESL Teacher in a predominately low-income, People of Color area by day, college Gender Studies Professor by night, and Editor whenever she has free time! She joined Stop Street Harassment in order to share her stories from a Queer, Woman of Color perspective and to encourage other Queer Women of Color to do the same. Takeallah spends her free time exploring Seattle’s bookstores, binge-watching documentaries on Netflix, and perfecting her side-eye. Follow her on Instagram @BurningBraRadicalDoula, Twiter @The BurningBra, and check out her monthly column on The Trifecta Tribe, “The Burning Bra Chronicles.”
Yuriana Sobrino, Boston, USA
Yuriana is a drummer and an advocate for domestic violence survivors. She’s from Mexico but is currently living in Boston MA. At the age of 6 years old she started playing music with her brothers. Since then music has been her life and the passion for it brought her to move to Boston in 2007 to study at Berklee College of Music where she graduated with a Performance Degree. In October of 2014, she started working as a domestic violence advocate at the Massachusetts Statewide Domestic Violence Hotline, Safelink, where she is currently the Assistant Coordinator. There she’s been learning about crisis intervention, safety planning, domestic violence and its effects, resources available for survivors and especially about how to understand and listen to them from a non-judgmental perspective. She is very enthusiastic about helping to end abuse in all its forms and specially in creating awareness about how to prevent it. Learn more about her at her website www.yurianasobrino.com and you can follow her on Twitter, @YurianaSobrino.
Tracey Wise, London, UK
Born and raised in London, Tracey is a graduate of City University. She has spent the best part of her life at gigs and festivals and obsessing about music. She considers herself outside of work, best described as alternative. Alongside this, she is politically aware. After a recent trip to a gig that ended with an act of sexual harassment, it seemed natural to combine her love of music with her political awareness. From this, she created the “Safe Gigs for Women” project. Currently based in London, but with plans to expand, her aims are threefold: Firstly, talking to venues to support them in making changes towards safer environments and taking complaints of sexual harassment seriously. Secondly, challenging prevailing attitudes of gig goers. Lastly, getting bands and artists talking about our work, in the hope it provokes wider debate.
