Heidi Basch-Harod. (photo: colorado.edu/cwa)
In celebration of Women’s History Month, please meet the extraordinary female artivist Heidi Basch-Harod, executive director of Women’s Voices Now (WVN), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization using film to drive social change to advance girls’ and women’s global rights.
She oversees the vision, strategy, and international fundraising efforts to sustain and grow WVN’s programs.
Heidi brings her expertise in international human rights advocacy from her work with the Tibetan Nuns Project, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress, and the Palestine-Israel Journal.
In 2021, she won a Daytime Emmy as a producer for the Girls’ Voices Now series in collaboration with Here Media.
For over ten years, Heidi has worked with youth aged 12 to 24, teaching empowerment workshops through Women’s Voices Now and the Girls’ Voices Now program. As a Holocaust educator, she actively engages with the Jewish community. She is often invited to speak at public middle and high schools across Los Angeles to educate students about antisemitism, various forms of racism and bigotry, and the transformative power of film.
Curious about Heidi’s origin story, I asked her a few questions:
What prompted the start of this nonprofit?
In 2012, after a little over half a decade of living, studying, traveling, and working in the Middle East, I returned to Southern California after completing a master’s degree at Tel Aviv University in Middle Eastern and African history, focusing on women’s rights movements of the Middle East and North Africa region.
Upon my return to the States, I met Leslie Sacks, founder and seed funder of Women’s Voices Now, who was searching for a new executive director for WVM.
Founded in 2010, WVM was based on the idea [that] women’s voices and their struggle for equality worldwide should be amplified. Furthermore, films can bring awareness to girls’ and women’s rights issues while forming and mobilizing a community committed to action.
Leslie’s vision sparked WVN’s first project: Women’s Voices from the Muslim World: A Short-Film Festival.
Sadly, after a decade-long battle with cancer, Leslie died in 2013, but his untiring quest for justice lives on in WVN’s mission.
Through our work, Women’s Voices Now envisions a global culture shift powered by the impact of film, in which communities and institutions believe in gender equality and adapt their behaviors and actions to support the systematic advancement of women and girls. We carry out this mission with our film festival, a youth program, Girls’ Voices Now, and a free online film collection, Voices for Change.
Why is this effort important?
Believe it or not, 2025 is probably the best year to be a woman or girl in human history. We have access to education, political participation, economic opportunities, and there are laws in place to ensure, if we don’t, we have recourse to pursue justice. This is a historically unprecedented reality.
At the same time, gender parity does not exist, and the incidence of violence against women never seems to diminish. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, one in four women experienced some form of violence in their lifetime. After the pandemic, that statistic rose to one in three women.
Research conducted by the United Nations in 2020 found that 90 percent of the world’s population holds some form of bias against women that keeps us from truly being equal.
What are some of WVN’s accomplishments?
In 2021, one of the films in our youth development program, Girls’ Voices Now, won a Daytime Emmy. Since it was during a pandemic year, we attended the ceremony virtually.
A few months later, I had the honor of reuniting with the young filmmakers in person, presenting them with their Emmy Awards. We just got a second Emmy nomination in December 2024, and we’ll find out if four more of our girls will become Emmy Award winners. spt
