Across America, a new song about female empowerment is starting to gain traction in the most peculiar of places- on Radio Disney.
“Slide over, I’m driving, I ain’t just another cliché riding,” Abi Ann’s song “Truck Candy” commands.
A catchy tune poking fun at some of the more ridiculous tropes in country music, “Truck Candy” is enjoying a run on the kids centric radio network and on iTunes Radio where it is featured.
Rise News recently spoke to the 18-year-old rising star via phone from her apartment in Nashville, TN about her upbringing, her music and what she hopes to accomplish in the changing country landscape.
“I think that history repeats itself,” Ann said when asked about changes in the genre. “I see country music becoming more open to seeing more unique changes. A good twenty years ago that may not have happened.”
Abi Ann was born in Texas but raised in Los Angeles.
“I was an extremely ADD kid, my parents threw me into a whole lot of different activities. Music was the only thing that really stuck,” Ann said. “I grew up with very strong country roots.”
She attended Campbell Hall School where she said that she was encouraged to try to strike it big.
“I grew up in LA and my friends called me Hannah Montana growing up,” Ann said. “I went to a very understanding school and they were very helpful with everything.”
One of her first big breaks came when she was able to join Kelly Clarkson on tour, performing before the superstar in 36 cities in the US and Canada. She said that she learned a great deal from the experience.
“It was my first major tour. Kelly really runs a very loose camp and there is like no tension on the tour. It was just really eye-opening and I learned about my craft,” Ann said of Clarkson. “She really plays with her sound. I have so much more respect for her because of how versatile she is.”
Abi Ann, an 18 year old rising star in the country music world.
After graduating from high school, Ann enrolled in Belmont University in Nashville where she is studying entrepreneurship, not exactly a major for those who wish to skirt through school.
She has a strong business sense, learning from her small business owning father the importance of being self-reliant.
“I’ve always been very much a believer in a separation of church and state in my life. I really like school and music,” Ann said. “I’m going to school for business because I want to be self-sufficient. I’ve just always had a knack for business. And I’ve always loved academics as much as music.”
The Clarkson tour wrapped up on September 20, which cut into the start of the fall semester. As a result, Ann is taking classes online but she hopes to take on campus classes in the future.
In terms of her sound, Ann said that she is very willing to mix different influences into her music from current pop and country music to some older legends that helped define the genre.
“My main influences were Johnny Cash and Shania Twain. That’s a weird combination for sure,” Ann said. “Shania, I look up to as a very strong woman figure.”
And that brings us back to her hit “Truck Candy”, a song that could easily be seen as a modern-day feminist ballad.
“It’s not that intense,” Ann said. But I’m very supportive of female empowerment.”
Saying that she views music as a form of therapy, Ann indicated that the song was more a direct response to the default masculinity that exists in much of country today.
“I wrote it with Walker Hayes. This was before Maddie and Tae and we were concerned about the gender imbalance in country music,” Ann said. “I definitely think it is an acquired taste. Country is not something that everybody loves.”
Ann made it clear that she deeply loves country music and sees it as one of the most vibrant music scenes going today.
Having only turned 18 a few months ago, Ann is still very young.
“I’ve had instances where I couldn’t go and do the typical teenage thing but I keep a pretty tight circle,” Ann said of some of the challenging aspects of fame. “But I have the best friends. My roommate is with me now and she’s smiling [listening to the interview].”
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Photo Credits: Submitted
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Meet IGNITE: The Organization Working To Get Millennial Women To Take Over Politics
There are only 104 women in the whole of the Congress, making up only 19.4% of the 535 combined members of both houses.
That dizzying gender-gap in politics was what inspired Dr. Anne Moses to create IGNITE, a non-profit organization that helps empower young women who want to run for public office.
Moses, the founder and president of IGNITE has been determined to fight for women’s equal political representation from a young age.
When she was 23 years old Moses watched as Anita Hill got attacked by scores of Senators on national television after she claimed that future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. All the while, Moses noticed that there was not a single woman on the Senate Judiciary committee.
Moses realized that to reach political equity, young women had to be trained to be leaders who are ready to run for office.
She started IGNITE in 2009 with the purpose of training young women to think critically about policy and to become civically engaged.
“Young women deserve the most amount of support and mentorship to walk the path to politics,” Sara Guillermo, the Chief Program Officer for IGNITE said in an interview with RISE NEWS.
The founding states of IGNITE are California, Texas and Colorado but the organization has been expanding over the years.
Young women from high schools, colleges and universities receive training via high school curriculum, college chapters, annual conferences, and elected officials events.
Guillermo is thankful to these pioneering young women who have taken the opportunity to develop professionally and digest policy topics that they care about.
IGNITE trains young women between the ages of 14 and 22.
“When we get them younger, we get them to stay with us and the impact we create for them is incredible and valuable,” Guillermo said.
The issue of gender equality has been present in the world for several decades and yet the rate of progress has been painfully slow.
Thus, the question still remains, why do we have so few women running for elected office?
Guillermo’s answer to this is that they are not asked to, “they [women] are not socialized enough” in the idea of running for office.
IGNITE is an outlet were young women can see that they have the capacity to lead and make a change.
The response so far has been extremely positive as the organization has trained over 5,000 young women in their own communities from various backgrounds.
Over the years of teaching the curriculum, Guillermo has had some beautiful success stories.
One of them is of an undocumented young woman that had the leadership and drive to get involved in politics, but also had many other barriers in her life.
As an undocumented person she was prevented from studying abroad or when applying to college she had limited opportunities. She could not apply for FAFSA for example.
Thanks to IGNITE she had the opportunity to take her first plane ride and what a ride it was.
She flew to Washington D.C. and met with some of President Obama’s advisors.
According to Guillermo, she is currently attending college and starting an IGNITE chapter there.
In the future the founders of the group are thinking of expanding.
They will host seven conferences in seven cities and will launch fellowships programs to lead national college work.
Guillermo has advice for young people who have a passion for making a change in their communities or for being involved in politics.
“Try everything at least once, find a mentor to talk to, don’t be scared to try something different, we walk around with fear and not wanting to do certain things, just do it,” Guillermo said.
To learn more you can visit the group’s website: http://www.IGNITEnational.org
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in the world. You can write for us.
Cover Photo Credit: IGNITE/ Submitted
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Miami Archbishop Announces Findings Of Investigation Into Priest Accused Of Improprieties
Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski released a letter to the parishioners of St. Rose of Lima in Miami Shores today on his investigation of the parish’s former priest Father Pedro Corces.
In it, Wenski claimed that many of the allegations leveled against Corces in a 129 page dossier of information were not true.
However, Wenski’s investigation also found that Corces was not fit for service as a parish priest and he accepted Corces’ resignation.
Wenski’s investigation was prompted after a group of concerned parents at St. Rose accused Corces of putting children at the school in “grave danger” after he allegedly hired a man as a school maintenance worker who was once arrested on prostitution charges.
The parents united under the name of Christifidelis and they paid a private investigator over $3,500 to surveil Father Corces to help them build a case against him. Once they could no longer afford the investigator’s services, parents took to surveilling Father Corces on their own, even digging around the rectory trash to find incriminating documents.
The parent’s report also alleged that Father Corces took frequent expensive vacations, sometimes with a St. Rose maintenance worker and that he often spent the night at the same workers condo where they claimed Corces paid the cable bill.
Read More: Miami Priest Accused Of Hiring School Maintenance Worker Who Was Once Arrested For Prostitution
During the investigation, Wenski said that Corces volunteered to take a polygraph exam and that the priest denied any sexual improprieties with school maintenance staff.
“The investigation of these allegations is now completed,” Wenski said in the letter. “Based on the outcome of extensive interviews of all persons that could have knowledge of the truth of these allegations as well as the results of a voluntary polygraph examination of Fr. Corces, it is concluded that no sexual impropriety had occurred. Nevertheless, Father’s decisions to hire friends to work for the Parish and his continues socializing with them outside the Parish did contribute to the perception among some of inappropriate behavior.”
Read the whole letter:
Letter from Archbishop Wenski on Fr. Corces Investigation
Interestingly, while short on specifics, Wenski’s letter did say something damning about Corces:
“The investigation did identify other deficiencies with Fr. Corces’ administration in which we failed to follow clear Archdiocesan policies.”
While trying to put a bow on the story, Wenski may have only opened up more questions as to the full extent of what actually happened.
For example, which specific deficiencies were there with Corces’ administration?
Which clear Archdiocesan policies did he not follow?
Why was Sister Bernadette Keane fired from her role as principal before the end of the school year?
Did the maintenance worker not have a criminal record when he was hired?
This is a developing story. Stay with RISE NEWS for further updates.
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in public affairs. You can write for us.
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Internships Can Suck Real Hard. This Website Is Trying To Help Interns Fight Back
Internships are a way of life for millions of young Americans each year.
And lots of them suck. Like they suck a great deal. They can be soul crushing, demeaning and huge wastes of time and money.
Some people relocate for a semester long unpaid internship in a far-flung locale only to find out that they will be doing little more than getting coffee for the next 10 weeks.
Into this depressing mix enters Internpub, a website promising to give young people “knowledge about what they are getting themselves into when interning for a specific organization, company, or elected official.”
Founded by Ian Crueldad last year, the site boasts more than 2,500 personal reviews of popular internships around the country.
Raised by a single mom in San Jose, Crueldad graduated from George Washington University in 2015 and has been involved in politics for his entire adult life.
The self-described “political junkie” had never been involved in a startup before Internpub but felt that there was a real need for something like this.
“The idea of Internpub came from the experiences I had when I was interning in college,” Crueldad said in an interview with RISE NEWS. “I never had a bad internship myself. Nevertheless, I noticed through interacting with other interns that many of them were either unprepared for the internship, did not receive the internship experience they thought they were going to receive, or were not treated fairly Therefore I knew the idea for Internpub would provide the platform needed to help interns find the internship that best fits them.”
Crueldad said that he thinks that internships are necessary today in the US due to the fact that “more and more employers are demanding that a person have some sort of internship experience before even considering to hire them.”
Indeed, more than 1.5 million internships are filled each year in the US and the trend for more and more of this type of work is only increasing.
While young people may not need more places on the web to find internship listings, Crueldad is betting that they want to make smarter decisions about where to intern.
“I believe that in the future, Internpub could be the main website where interns can rate and review internships and be the platform that help interns start their careers,” Crueldad said.
And what about that whole entrepreneurial element? After-all, Crueldad is a pretty young guy to be running a startup that hopes to revolutionize an important part of the economy.
“I would say to a young person who wants to start their own startup is to overcome any self doubt and just get things started,” Crueldad said. “I started Internpub and received investments for it before graduating from college. I did not have a business background or a technical background when I first started Internpub. Yet I simply got things started, eventually received investments, and now the website is growing.”
For more information about Internpub, you can visit their website: www.internpub.com
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in public affairs. You can write for us.
Cover Photo Credit: IAEA Imagebank/ Flickr (CC By 2.0)
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