How Lola Omolola started one of the fastest growing groups in Facebook’s history 🌐Lola Omolola of Female IN (FIN)
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TRANSCRIPT
Bailey Richardson: How did you realize you needed to reach other Nigerian women?
Lola Omolola: My story didn’t start the day I hit “create group” on Facebook at all. I had to go through a personal awakening first. I was only 11 when I first woke up to the fact that my experience of the world as a woman was different from my brother’s experience.
BR: What happened when you were 11 years old?
LO: There was a party at our family house. I was preparing for an exam and my dad told me that instead of joining the party, I needed to study for my exam on Monday.
I said, “Okay Dad.” But here’s the thing. Every few minutes while I was studying, a woman would come in to say, “We need you in the kitchen,” or “Come help clean the plates.”
I’d tell them I couldn’t because my Dad told me to study. But after the third or fourth person came into the room to go ask me to do some task, I looked out the window. I saw my brother was right there playing football—just right there outside the door. Not a single person had an expectation of him helping in the kitchen. He was apparently free.
This was the first day it occurred to me that the expectations placed on me are absolutely different from those on my brother. I started paying attention then, and once you’re paying attention you just can’t shut it off.
BR: Describe the moment you decided to start a Facebook group.
LO: In 2014, I turned on the news here in Chicago. (I had moved from Nigeria in 2011.) I saw that armed men had stormed a school in Nigeria and had just kidnapped 276 girls.
Whenever I turned on the radio and TV following that event, everyone wanted to talk about terrorism, saying terrorism was responsible for what happened. I had a completely different take on it because I was one of those children. It was an awakening.
BR: What was different about your understanding of the Boko Haram kidnappings from what the news said?
We have a society in Nigeria that has built structures—cultural structures, religious structures—that were designed to systemically condition men to think of women as being not worth as much as they are. And women were getting trained to endure their violence and mistreatment and not say anything.
It was a structural woman’s issue. I felt that the foundational need to change all this was to get women to speak up.
BR: How did you prepare the FIN Facebook page to go live?
Prior to the Boko Haram news, I hadn’t been a member of a group on Facebook so I had no reference point. I just knew that I wanted to do something to amplify the voices of women.
My first thought was to find women who were like me—women who were losing sleep over the same issues and we’re concerned that women weren’t bonding. Women who wanted to create real, authentic relationships that were enduring. I wanted to create a space where women like me could all come together and form some sort of a resource.
BR: How did you find the first people who joined the group?
I knew a woman that I met online who ran a community of more than 200,000 people at that time. I reached out to her and ask if she wanted to come on board to help me with my new group. So I made a few partners like her.
But here’s what I think was consequential to our success. In those days, I knew what the issues were that women were not talking about openly. So I went through the Internet to find conversations about those topics. I’d find little snippets on Twitter, Facebook and Blogs by regular women talking about their personal experiences.
For example, I found the story of a widow who had tried to get an apartment in Nigeria because she lost her husband and needed a house for her family to stay in. The landlord told her, “I’m sorry that we’re not going to rent to a woman unless you bring your husband with you.” If a woman does not come to a meeting without a man, the assumption is that something is not right about her.
BR: What was the response like to those first posts like?
I expected that when I highlighted those quotes and put them on the group wall, that the women I had invited to the group were just going to have a wide angle conversation about the issues, kind of like punditry
But boy was I surprised. It got really personal really quickly. People would respond in the comments with their own experiences, saying “oh my God, that happened to me yesterday,” or “This happened to my sister!”
Photograph by Kai Elmer Sotto
“I hadn’t been a member of a group on Facebook so I had no reference point. I just knew that I wanted to do something to amplify the voices of women.”
BR: I think the main contribution the Instagram community team had in the early days was our push to tell stories about interesting ways other people were taking photos. People will mimic what they see others doing.
It sounds like that’s exactly what you did— you role modeled a behavior so that members could pick it up themselves.
Since I didn’t do any commentary with those quotes, I didn’t frame the conversation with editorializing. Some of the quotes I posted were just one liners, and immediately women’s personal responses would appear in the comments that were so raw. Much more powerful than the original quote that I had found on the Internet.
When I started noticing taking comments that were even more in-depth and more relatable than the quotes I had found initially, I did what any sensible person would do. I highlighted exceptional comments as their own posts. I reposted the comments as quotes, put the owner’s name under the quote, and made clear that the quote was from a person commenting in FIN.
That expanded the conversation. And new members who saw that a lot of people were sharing, felt okay about sharing their own stories. I forced them to see that “Look, they shared their story and they’re still alive. Nothing is gonna happen to me if I do the same.”
People were just sharing and sharing and they started and I think we were all surprised at how deep we were going. Members started sharing the group with female friends, and more people organically found out about it. We have consistently had up to 4,000 new members each day, and in those early days I would review every single person who asked to join.
BR: Why did the conversations resonate so deeply with so many women, do you think?
LO: You have to remember that we’re dealing in a culture where this is not the norm at all. In Nigeria if something is wrong with you, you just go to the same traditional spaces that are systematically structured to undermine a woman’s voice.
Like if a woman has something unfair happen to her in the workplace or church, they go to a family elder or to a person that is respected in the community to try to get a resolution. Or, if a woman has issues with their spouse, they are expected to go to their mother-in-law—their husband’s mother. These places are not necessarily accommodating of your individual experience, but these are the only options that were available to women.
So that meant that the culture was like a pressure cooker ready to burst.
I couldn’t believe just how the depth of pain and burden women been carrying in their lives. I remember one of the early ones where a woman had not shared and told anyone for 40 years that she was being sexually assaulted by her father. I remember a story that was shared about a woman whose husband would drag her a block down the road when he was angry, and no one would stand up for her. And I remember a woman who wrote to the community as she was hiding in the corner of her kitchen away from her spouse who was pummeling her in front of their child. This is what our community is carrying.
BR: So what was the timeline—how long did it take for the page to take off?
LO: People want to know if there was a shotgun moment where it just started taking off. I have to tell you, it was pretty immediate. I posted hundreds of times over the first 24 hours. I did not sleep for days. I was reading and re-posting around the clock. It got to a point where members would be like, “Lola, you really need to go to sleep!”
But I was trying to set a tone of kindness, compassion. I knew it was important for to to prioritize the voice of the individual who was stepping out of her comfort zone and being courageous to tell her story. I didn’t make any exceptions for people being cruel or judging others. As a community, we defended them, we did not judge, and we were serious about enforcing that.
I think people saw my complete commitment to a culture of kindness in those first couple of days. I was there around the clock to watch out for them. That made people feel safe to share their very painful stories for the first time. They saw they were not going to be insulted or treated badly. They were going to be appreciated and no one was going to judge them.
BR: How did you know to be so active in moderating the group so early in the group’s existence?
LO: I wasn’t trying to be strategic this early days. I was just excited. I was living in my authentic truth. This is something that had mattered to me all of my life.
It wasn’t just finding people who were like me. I was finding people who were passionate about what was important to me. What I had been alone worrying about and thinking about and suddenly validation was everywhere. There were other people to talk with about these things that will were all raised with a pinch and a shush to shut up about.
Photograph by Kai Elmer Sotto
“Our community has become a lifeline. We have spent hours on the phone talking people off the ledge.”
BR: You now have a team of moderators and more than 1.7 million people in the group. How do you keep the conversations valuable as you’ve grown?
LO: The answer is I used to say it’s not rocket science, but I’m starting to understand that it actually might be!
Here’s how I think about it. How do we connect?
Vulnerability.
Whenever we’re vulnerable, it enhances our ability to connect meaningfully. The way we transform our relationships from surface level to really deep connection is whenever we talk about ourselves and what makes us most afraid or ashamed.
So what it means is for FIN is that we decided to tighten up the kind of posts that we approved in our community so that we can continue to be vulnerable.
I used to allow people to post random questions or things that have to do with their personal lives. We have phased that out. We no longer approve those kinds of posts.
What we approve today is actually much more personal than what was posted in the beginning. There are higher standards on the community, too. Our team of trained moderators are working all the time, reading every single post. We only approve about two out of 100 posts members submit.
Most of the work that goes into FIN is this work on the backend. We have a triage system now for our members who are facing serious issues in their lives. Because now, women think to contact us first before they even think about calling the police. Our community has become a lifeline. We have spent hours on the phone talking people off the ledge.
BR: You’ve also changed the name of the group from Female In Nigeria to Female IN to welcome even more women.
Was that a hard decision?
LO: When we made the decision to widen who could join the group, member were terrified. They were coming out and posting about how we were going to lose what makes the group special, you know, and that we needed to keep membership down to 10,000.
My response to them was, “What you’re saying is that we should actively lock out women who want to be here. That’s not fair.” For me, it was a service mindset.
BR: When I finished working at Instagram, I was really tired emotionally because the work was so personal for me. I met and got to know so many of the people that were a part of our community.
I can tell that you have put so much into FIN. How do you manage having to be strong for other people all the time?
LO: I’m going to tell you, I struggle. I struggle because it’s hard to see people go through so much. Whether it’s good news or bad news, I walk right into somebody else’s experience. I take on the energy of other people, and we have to do it all day and all night. It takes a toll emotionally and there are days when I can barely cope. There are days when I have to take a break.
But I know that there are people who have done amazing acts of change in this world and they have lost their lives doing it. People have died for some of the benefits that I enjoy today. It is a privileged that I get to do this work and that people trust me with their stories, even though they’d been hurt over and over and over again.
So yeah, I struggle, you know. Sometimes I suck it up and sometimes when I need help I ask.
Photograph by Kai Elmer Sotto
BR: If you had a magic wand and you could do anything for the FIN community, what would you do?
LO: I would take FIN to the real world—to where women are in their communities.
I would create 30 resource centers around the world in strategic places where women know that they can walk in and have the experience that they have in our Facebook community, because there are women who don’t have access to the Internet. To be able to turn the tone and resources of the FIN community in a real life alternative to the traditional spaces where women have to go because they don’t have options.
We can do better. No woman should have to live a subpar life because she didn’t have access to the information could make a difference for her life. And I am ready to spend my entire life making sure I change that.
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