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Latest Updates About Fashionable Muslim Women Project

Members of the Fashionable Muslim Women Project (FMWP) met at Project Director Saideh Jamshidi’s house. This would be their final meeting before launching the project. The purpose of the meeting was to finalize some of the project’s details such as:

  • the launch date
  • web interface
  • steps to take for fundraising
  • new deadlines to submit stories

While waiting for everyone to show up, further delays of Laura Zimmerman, FMWP’s web designer, raised some concerns. Saideh called Laura to find out that Laura hadn’t received any of the email correspondances about the meeting. Laura couldn’t be there because she hadn’t been notified. Disappointed at first, they quickly agreed to meet the following week to discuss about the FMWP’s new look.

In the meeting in Saideh’s house, Sara Sculline, one of the main writers, suggested to use two types of deadlines. The first could be a “soft deadline,” and the second would be “certain deadlines” for launching the project. Everyone agreed to announce October 8th as the project’s certain deadline. Also, because great achievements cannot be left out without a proper celebration, all 8 members of the FMWP decided to celebrate the launch of the project on October 13 at Saideh’s house.

One of the important questions that FMWP members had to answer concerned the scope of the project. Ideally, they would all love to keep working on topics they enjoyed, but they knew they could cover more issues other than fashion within the Islamic arena. These include film, culture, music, art, dance, literature, women issues, and so forth. In this session, they decided to expand their efforts to establish themselves as non-profit news organization with emphasis on introducing Islam and art while also combating Islamophobia and creating engaged conversations about Islam in a public forum.

Next steps for the group after October 8th would be to apply for non-profit status through both federal agencies and the state of Wisconsin.

To continue working towards their goals, the FMWP group members need to raise money for their current efforts and the future of their non-profit.

Saideh and FMWP photographer Nicholas Wynia decided to team up to produce a video for the purpose of fundraising. They intend to post their video and project info on indeigogo.com, an international crowd funding site, to raise money.

The following week, Laura and Saideh met at the Barriques Café on Capitol. They came to a decision on the final look of the website and the content layout. They discussed the potential of posting stories about the fashion industry and linking them back to the publishing sites. Saideh promised Laura that she would provide her with the FMWP logo.

Saideh and Nicholas are meeting this week to film a few individuals for their indeigogo video. Nicholas is also planning to talk with team members for more information.

Sara S. Jamshidi: Sara S. Jamshididi is an American-Iranian journalist and entrepreneur. Sara is the founder of Goltune. She has worked in every aspects of print and broadcast media in the U.S. and Iran.