On Tuesday, June 6th, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg received Lola Omolola, Chicago-based Nigerian founder of Facebook group, Females In Nigeria (FIN) at Facebook Headquarters in California.
Taking to his page, Zuckerberg wrote that he will be meeting with Omolola and some administrators of top Facebook groups in Chicago later this month for the first ever Facebook Communities Summit.
His full post below:
“I’m heading to Chicago later this month for our first ever Facebook Communities Summit with a few hundred of our top Facebook group admins.
For the past decade, Facebook has been focused on making the world more open and connected — and we’re always going to keep doing that. But now it’s clear we have to do more. We also need to bring people closer together and build common understanding. One of the best ways to do that is by helping people build community, both in the physical world and online.
I’ve written and talked about these themes throughout this year — especially in my community letter in February and at Harvard Commencement last month. This summit will be the next chapter and we’ll discuss more of what we’re building to empower community leaders to bring the world closer together.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been meeting group admins across the country who are building meaningful communities on Facebook and will be at the summit.
This photo is with Lola, who lives in Chicago and is originally from Nigeria.
Two years ago, she founded a secret Facebook group called Female IN, or FIN. It’s a no-judgment space where more than a million women come to talk about everything from marriage and sex to health issues and work problems — and it’s helping end the culture of silence that exists for women in some parts of the world.
I’m looking forward to meeting more admins like Lola and talking about how we can help them do even more to build community. I’ll share more info on the summit as we get closer, and I’ll stream the event live from my profile later this month.
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Here’s a snippet from the BBC article that highlights how Lola started the group –
Fin started out as a group where women could discuss women’s issues – one of the first blogs was on domestic violence – and Ms Omolola expected it to be an abstract conversation.
But women responded with their own stories.
Almost instantly it became a place where people could share things they had never shared before.
“When we started I used to cry. I stopped sleeping, I stopped eating,” she says. “I was not ready for the stories that were coming out.”
“There were women who had been abused for 40 years and hadn’t told anyone. No-one should live like that.”
Now the group gets hundreds of applications for posts every day but they are managed and approved by a group of 28 volunteers. About 40-100 make it on the page.
Fin has strict rules. Above anything else, Finsters are not allowed to judge each other. Any negative comments are removed, as is the member who posts them.
“I noticed that those people who try to shut women up in real life, they came there,” says Ms Omolola.
“They are so deeply conditioned to work against their own interest.
“It’s the online version of the pinch and the shush.”
But the pinchers and shushers were persistent.
In a religiously conservative society like Nigeria, expressions of female sexual freedom were never going to go unchallenged.
Some members tried to get around the ban by commenting with passages from the bible which condemned the woman’s actions.
That inspired a second rule – no preaching.
“We prohibit religious-themed advice,” it says in the rules. “Fin is not a place of worship.”
Click the link for the full BBC article.
The group sounds dope – I want to join!
