Today we’d like to introduce you to Anna Renshaw
Hi Anna, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’ve always been interested in community engaged advocacy. The church community I grew up in always highly encouraged me as a young person to get involved in social action, and often would even facilitate it. My first real protest was in Portland in 2016 so I would’ve been 14 at the time, and it was during the first big wave of Black Lives Matter protests. It felt like nothing I had ever experienced before. Suddenly, it clicked. People-everyday people-could make big things like this happen. Before I turned 18 I had attended 5 more protests, which doesn’t sound like a lot when you look at how much is going on today, but for being a young teenager at that time when social justice movements didn’t have the kind of reach they do now, it was a lot.
So when I reached adulthood, Covid had hit and I hit pause on a lot of my community engagement work because gathering in large groups didn’t feel like the right thing to do for the wider community. I was focusing on college, and then in 2022 I took a class called Gender On the Hill at the U. This class was focused on tracking bills during the Utah Legislative Session and learning how to lobby for legislation. And that felt like finding a missing puzzle piece for me. It reminded me how much work I could be doing and how much I used to love doing it. And then, a couple months later, the Roe decision was leaked. I knew what I had to do.
It didn’t initially start as a plan to form an entire organization, it started as a plan to organize a couple of small protests. And I do mean small. The first one I organized was honestly tiny, I think we had maybe 20-30 people show up. I didn’t expect much more than that. I made some connections, and thought maybe I would do it again. After the first rally, I started to see people saying that they weren’t feeling patriotic at all after Roe was overturned, and they wanted an alternative event to attend on the 4th of July that year. I asked around with other local orgs, and none of them were planning them. So I thought, why not me? I made a flyer, posted it, and expected about the same reaction as the last one. And then it completely blew up. I couldn’t believe it. It was getting shared everywhere, people were reposting it on Reddit and Facebook pages, and when we showed up at the Capitol on July 4th and saw 1,000 people waiting there for our event, I knew that I had created something much bigger than myself.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely has had a few bumps here and there. Social justice work is rewarding but it can also be incredibly draining. And there will always be people who try to tell you you’re doing it wrong. It takes a willingness to learn and be corrected. Especially as a white organizer, I’ve made my share of mistakes. But my belief is that it isn’t the mistakes you make that define you, it’s how you handle them and learn from them.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
While being a community organizer is a form of work, it’s more of a volunteer position than a job for me. I have a day job that pays my bills, and running the organization and planning events is just a labor of love. The thing about PCPU that I’m most proud of is how many different people I’ve been able to give a voice through my events. I also believe this is what sets my organization apart from a lot of others. When I first entered the SLC protest scene in 2022, the standard was for grassroots orgs to have people from within their own organization do all the speeches at their events. I wanted to do something different, and give the people a voice. I curate a list of speakers for each individual event, based on what the event is focused on. It’s important to me that nobody gets left out of the conversation, and that nobody is left waiting for a chance to be heard. I’m proud to say that getting community members up to the mic and letting them tell their stories has become the new norm for SLC protests in recent years!
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
I can credit so many people with helping me get to where I am now, the whole list would be far too long to fit here. But of course my parents have to be number one, because they encouraged my advocacy work when I was very young and have always been there to support me in it. Kilo Zamora, my Gender on the Hill teacher, of course deserves some credit for re-sparking my love of social justice. And then there’s my fellow community organizers who lift me up and are always willing to lend a helping hand-Oak with Druids for change is a longtime friend of mine, all the organizers of Green Wave Utah, Planned Parenthood Action Council, my new friends at Utah 50501-just to name a few. There is such a strong support network within Utah’s grassroots organizing community and they have all been like a family to me.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prochoicepeopleofutah?igsh=MTVqdGhzaDBqMmttMA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@prochoicepeopleut?_t=ZT-8umySnQkORq&_r=1
