8 / 17 / 2023

Dear Friends,

America Ferrera (now of the great Barbie monologue fame, but brilliant and articulate well before then!) gave a 14 min Ted Talk about accepting and embracing her identity back in 2019. In it she said “I realized I was never actually asking the system to change, I was asking it to let me in. And those aren’t the same things.”

We talk a lot about changing the game around gender dynamics within alley-oop. But with society’s please for ‘giving women a seat at the table’, allowing women to be in the ‘room where it happens’, and even the cliched ‘girls can do anything boys can do, only better’ - to me, this all sounds a lot like asking to be let into a game already in progress.

That’s not what we mean when we talk about changing the game.

It’s important, sure, to understand the existing game in order to learn from it - with both curiosity and empathy. But the foundational cracks in the existing game are already very clear, and have been for some time. We don’t want an invitation to this current game, we want to create a new one.

A game in which ALL voices are heard and considered. A game that enables the entire population to contribute and dream and create.

At alley-oop we take this very seriously. We’re getting closer to being able to unveil our next step and we can’t wait to tell you more in September. Stay tuned . . .