Alexis McGill Johnson, President & CEO, Planned Parenthood | MAKERS Community Conversations

This is the motivation we need. The MAKERS Community sat down with Alexis McGill Johnson, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood. On all of our minds: how does Alexis maintain a positive, proactive attitude during such trying times? For her, it’s all about being a hope dealer and fueling the fire for the long hall.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS MCGILL JOHNSON: My job is to be a hope dealer. I got to be out making sure everybody feels the hope, right? Because we can't let what's before us overwhelm us, right? We got to actually take a deep breath, process it, but also get up every day and keep fighting.

And it is a long fight. So like so much of my work right now is to prepare people, that this didn't happen overnight. You know, I was born in 1972, so all my entire life I've taken this for granted, knowing that I would always have access to the care that I needed. And now waking up as we talked earlier, like, our children have less rights than we did growing up at their age.

And so I come back to this Alice Walker poem, "hope is a woman who lost her fear," and I think it's really about being unafraid, it's being unapologetic. It is about kind of letting that fuel the fire for the long haul.