Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of E-Sharp magazine. Go to e-sharp.E.U for free access to all our podcast to date. This is Paul Adamson, and I'm in conversation with Susanna Wellford.

Susanna is the CEO and founder of Running Start,

a non-partisan nonprofit organization training young women to run for political office.

Well, the hint is in the title, the job spec, Susanna.

But let me start by asking you, what is your background and why did you start this organization?

First, thank you so much, Paul, for having me on.

I'm very happy to talk to you today.

So I think you really, in order to understand why I'm doing what I'm doing today,

you have to go all the way back to the time that I was in middle school.

And it's because I think from the time that I was very young, I was interested in leadership

and in sort of doing big things and solving problems, but I had a lot of doubt about whether

I was good enough to do those things.

And I really felt that way up until my 30s when I started working for a very powerful woman.

She had been the governor of Texas.

Her name was Anne Richards.

Oh, wow.

Yes, a well-known lady.

Yeah, she was, she was amazing.

And it was the first time in my life that I realized that that voice in my head that said,

I'm not good enough, everybody else is better, I'm not supposed to be here, that that was a very

universal voice for women, that so many women feel that same way.

And so what I had been thinking about as a problem within myself really was something that

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