Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Follow Us:
Top Stories

Meet the change leaders: Cynthia Richie Terrell

Cynthia Richie Terrell
RepresentWomen

Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen, is an outspoken advocate for institutional reforms to advance women’s representation and leadership in the United States.

Terrell and her husband, Rob Richie. helped to found FairVote — a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters greater choice, a stronger voice and a more representative democracy. Terrell has worked on projects related to women’s representation, democracy and voting system reform in the United States and has helped parliamentarians around the globe meet United Nations goals for women’s representation and leadership.


She has worked as campaign manager and field director for candidates for the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate and governor. She has also been involved in state and city-wide initiative efforts, including a state equal rights amendment.

In 2024 Terrell was named one of Washington, D.C.’s top policy experts and received a Generational Impact Award for her work on voting system reform. Terrell is a member of Citizen University’s Civic Collaboratory and was named a Brewer fellow along with a cohort of leaders in the democracy reform movement. She has a chapter on women and the presidency in the 2020 volume of “ The Best Candidate: Presidential Nomination in Polarized Times.”

Terrell writes a weekly column on women’s representation for Ms. Magazine and has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Hill, Refinery29, The Nation, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The American Prospect, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun and The Christian Science Monitor. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” and has participated in numerous radio shows, podcasts and panel discussions on the topics of electoral reform and systems strategies to advance women’s representation and leadership.

Terrell is an avid knitter and gardener, has three children, and is active in local politics and in the Quaker community. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College in 1986.

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Terrell for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of her democracy reform work.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com


Read More

Trump and Carney standing next to American flag

U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to the White House on Oct. 7, 2025 in Washington, D.C.

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/TCA)

Trump’s war on Canada a pitiful own goal

This summer, America played host to one of the biggest international events on the planet, the World Cup, drawing millions of foreigners to our cities and towns, our stadiums and our national parks, where many of them had never been before.

The consensus was, America is awesome — visitors from Bolivia, Scotland, Uzbekistan, and everywhere in between marveled at the sheer size of our great nation, the diversity of our topography, the deliciousness of our foodstuffs, and, perhaps most importantly, the kindness of our people. (Not to mention, our eighth wonder of the world — Buc-ee’s.)

Keep ReadingShow less
A crowd of people at a military base with President Trump speaking in front of them.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a visit to the Fort Bragg U.S. Army base on February 13, 2026 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Nathan Howard/Getty Images

Reagan’s Strength vs. Trump’s Retreat: U.S. Alliances at Risk

How a country treats its allies and its adversaries says everything about what it believes strength means — a question that was already on my mind the night I sat in a movie theater watching "The Brink of War" when news broke.

The film reconstructs the 1986 Reykjavik summit, where President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev spent a tense weekend negotiating over the fate of the world's nuclear arsenals.

Keep ReadingShow less
A military ship out in the sea.

USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) conducts U.S. blockade operations related to the Strait of Hormuz on April 16, 2026 in the Arabian Sea.

Handout Photo by the U.S. Navy via Getty Images

Reasons to Care about the Sailors Aboard the USS Lincoln

The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for over 265 days, and over 200 days without a port call. The aircraft carrier left San Diego on November 21, 202 for a routine Pacific deployment, only to be redirected to the Middle East instead for a war Congress never declared and voted not to authorize. Carriers are supposed to pull in every 30 to 45 days for resupply, maintenance, and something resembling a break; the Lincoln has gone nearly five times that long without one–a modern record for a warship.

Consider what that actually means for a human being. You’re living at work, on a ship, with your coworkers, away from your family and friends, and now the ship is starting to fall apart: the water fountains are broken, the water is contaminated, sometimes water needs to be rationed so showers and laundry are secured, the showers are moldy, the toilets are clogged, and the food is rationed, rotten, and can be, as Congressman Mike Levin described, as meager as a half a cup of rice and two tortillas. These are horrible working conditions. Whether or not you believe sailors signed up for this when they joined the military, you must admit, it’s a brutal job.

Keep ReadingShow less