The outcome of the 2016 presidential election left Lauren Goldstein shaken and worried, like many others. A junior at Northwestern at the time, she was studying abroad in Copenhagen. When she woke up the morning after the election, she says, “I felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me and my generation of women.” She wanted to do something to empower her generation, and while she was trying to decide what that would be, she remembered interviewing women in the food industry for the Northwestern chapter of Spoon University, a food publication written by college students.
Her budget, she says, was zero. She didn’t think the event would have any overhead because she’d be using a campus building—but she still decided to sell tickets for $11 instead of making them free so that people would feel invested and be more likely to show up. When she realized there would be costs after all—programs, lunch, gift bags—some of the funds came from ticket sales, the rest from various academic departments at Northwestern that have budgets for cosponsoring events.
