When Executive Director of the Youth Reproductive Justice Summit (YRJS) Graysen Pendry read “So thank you, seriously, thank you” in a letter addressed to her after the 2025 conference, she knew that not having a second summit “wasn’t an option,” Pendry said. After months of planning and outreach, the Upper School Reproductive Justice Club successfully hosted over 120 Chicagoland students at the summit, which remains the only symposium of its kind. 

Originally, the conference started as a mere concept, but it came to fruition through hours of logistical planning and countless emails for outreach. “In the spring of my sophomore year, I was chosen to be one of the heads of the Reproductive Justice club, and we were told to give three small ideas, two medium ideas, and one big idea, and my big idea was the summit. Everyone initially said, ‘Sure, we can have that as a big overarching idea, but it is never going to happen,’ but I really wanted to see if it could happen.” Pendry said. “The administration really emphasized that this is something that maybe five years out, it can actually happen. I really didn’t like that, and so I just started working diligently to figure out what the summit might look like. And then the 2024 election really solidified that there was a really big need for this summit.” 

Pendry, however, wasn’t the only member of the Upper School working hard on the conference. Co-heads Christina Merikas, Leo Hild, Louise Hall, and Anais Morris have “been essential,” said Pendry, to ensure the success of the conference.

  The conference has evolved, bringing in more speakers and students.; While last year’s conference featured 21 speakers and 64 attendees, this year’s conference showed significant growth, featuring 24 speakers and 120 student attendees.

“This year, we wanted to boost student engagement within the sessions,” Pendry said. Pendry explained that, in order to boost engagement, the Executive board, a Chicago-wide group of students who helped plan the conference, changed the schedule of the entire conference. Instead of having five or more panels happening at once and having the speakers repeat their presentation, YRJS had three specific breakout sessions happening at once, each covering different issues, such as maternal care or misinformation after Roe v. Wade.   

Finance Chair Louise Hall agreed. “This year, we had a group of people outside of Parker working on planning the summit and getting speakers, which helped take a lot of work off of Graysen,” Hall said. “We also had a lot more meetings and met every Thursday night as an executive board to plan the conference, which was different from last year.”

This year, the executive board featured an Equity and Inclusion chair, Trisen Phillips, who helped make sure that schools in all parts of Chicago were able to attend the conference. “I wanted to make sure that we had voices coming from all over Chicago, since reproductive justice is valued very differently around the city,” Phillips said. Beyond diverse student engagement, Phillips was also responsible for ensuring that the speakers and topics covered a diverse range of representation and topics: from white and African-American women panelists to conversations about period poverty and food deserts, Phillips made sure that “the entirety of the city had a voice at the conference.”

While many aspects of the conference have evolved, one important factor has stayed the same: the influence and importance of keynote speakers. “The really incredible thing about all of our speakers was that they covered so many different facets. Some of them were journalists, some of them were State Senators, and some of them were executives and CEOs of their specific reproductive justice organization,” Pendry said. “Our criteria for speakers, which were found by the speakers team on the Executive board, was that they were someone who is very engaged in their own community and can bring a diverse perspective to the summit.” 

Outreach, however, was “no easy feat,” according to Pendry. Through hundreds of emails and efforts to find engaging speakers, the YRJS team worked tirelessly when it came to finding keynote speakers. “We had our speakers team find the speakers, and then Christina [Merikas] and I coordinated all the logistics, like parking or what time the speaker would present,” Pendry said. The influence of the speakers, however, was left up to the moderators, who crafted questions for the summit that aimed at being both impactful and engaging for the attendees.  

According to Executive Board member Ava Shirley, the conference has impacted both the Parker community and the greater Chicago community by “bringing together people from around the city to discuss something they’re passionate about.” 

Shirley also shared the summit’s overall significance to the city and how she felt the summit was “passing the torch” of advocacy and awareness from current professionals to the youth attending the conference. The impact of the conference, however, wasn’t the only aspect that stuck out to Shirley. “I felt more included at the summit [compared to other similar conferences] because of who the attendees were, and I felt I could relate to a lot more people in a more supportive environment,” Shirley said.

The YRJS team doesn’t plan to stop serving the city community through the conference. While Pendry won’t be running the summit next year, she still has goals and visions for the conference in the future. “This year, I focused a lot on paving the path for the leaders of the summit in the future so the conference can continue in the future,” Pendry said. Merikas, the Vice Summit Director, agrees, sharing that she plans to carry on the summit’s mission of “engaging, educating, and empowering young people” as Executive Director next year.

While Pendry’s time planning and running the summit has come to a close, her legacy and impact on the landscape of reproductive rights in Chicago won’t be forgotten. “I am just so grateful to have been a part of something that will continue on past my time at Parker and continue to impact an incredible number of people,” Pendry said.