TED Community » Diana Cihak
About Me
Diana began working on political campaigns in college while pursuing her degree in Political Communications. She served as staff on a presidential race in Chicago and then moved to Washington DC to work for a national committee. After leaving Washington her professional career went in another direction – event planning. Diana grew a small one-person event business into a 5 person firm that conducted numerous high profile events in Northern Michigan.
When she moved with her husband and children to Buffalo, New York she found herself back in the political world with the Obama campaign, where she directed the activities of Congressional Districts 26, 27 and 28 in Western New York. Duties included filling delegate slates, running petition drives and coordinating get out the vote efforts for Western New York for the primary in early 2008. After the primary she continued to organize WNY volunteers to travel to swing states and began to work with other organizers around the state on this effort. She served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.
She took a position as a Community Organizer with Citizen Action of New York working on health care reform for Health Care for American Now in May 2008. As an Community Organizer she continued to work on and direct campaign activities for a number of campaigns from school board to Congressional elections.
In January of 2010 Diana took the position of Senior Policy Analyst for the Democratic Majority at the Erie County Legislature, she served in that position until January of 2012.
Diana founded WomenElect with Virginia Davies in 2009 and she continues to be the driving force behind the organization. She is currently working with others to develop WomenElect into a viable organization that promotes the leadership development of women throughout New York State. WomenElect’s unique approach to providing hands on leadership training, mentoring and skill building were designed by Diana and the curriculum promises to fill the pipeline of women who will say yes to running for office at all levels of government throughout New York State. Currently WomenElect chapters are operating in Buffalo, Manhattan and Rochester with new chapters planned for other cities in the near future. You can find out more about the activities and programs WomenElect offers at the website www.womenelect.org
Diana lives in Buffalo, New York and is the mother of three beautiful children, Sage, 13, Jasmine, 11 and Colby 6.
- Location:
- United States, Buffalo, NY
- Current organization:
- WomenElect
- Past organizations:
- Women Events Buffalo
- Current role:
- Founder/Program Director
- Gender:
- Female
- Areas of expertise:
- Political Communications
- I am:
- Business adviser, Change Agent, Connector, Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Event planner, Idea generator, Parent, Startup
- My website links:
- Women Events Buffalo, WomenElect, TEDxBuffaloWomen
More About Me
I'm passionate about
Encouraging more women to run for office in the U.S.!
An idea worth spreading
We need to work on leadership development and access to resources so that women will be comfortable, ready, willing and able to run for office. We need public financing of elections in the U.S. because that will encourage more women and minorities to run and to be competitive. And we need to change the negative culture and personal attacks (that are really just adult bullying) in political campaigns so that more women will run, more voters will be engaged, more issues will be discussed and more problems will be solved.
Talk to me about
Progressive politics, women in leadership, the demands of motherhood and the Grateful Dead.
People don't know that I'm good at
Staying quiet all day on Sundays because the rest of the time I talk too much! lol
My TED Story
TEDxBuffaloWomen was an natural extension of a group of women in Buffalo, New York coming together to create the conversation about women in leadership in our region. This is our first TED event, we are very excited by the response we have had from women at all levels of leadership and power to engage in this conversation through the power of the TED moniker. We hope that this is the first of many events that will create a conversation that inspires others to find solutions to the problems in their own communities and issue areas.
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