A local campaign aiming to get more women into office kicked off their campaign school event Saturday at City Hall.

Equal Voice’s Alberta North Chapter wants to help and encourage more women to run for office in the upcoming October elections. Their goal is to have at least 50 per cent of the candidates be women.

“The last election we realized that there wasn't women running in every ward and part of the challenge is, ‘how do we encourage women to run?’ A lot of them feel less confident about their skills,” Ward 2 Councilor Bev Esslinger said. “So what we’re trying to do is give them events or opportunities to learn what it is to be a candidate, how to run a campaign, and hopefully that translates into more women running. If we have more women running, we should have more women elected.”

The north chapter’s chairman Lana Cuthbertson believes that this campaign is crucial to get women to run for office in Alberta.

“It’s very important that we encourage women to run for office,” Cuthbertson said. “They tend to need more encouragement than men do, and they tend to need to be asked. So we need to ask women not once, twice, three to five times before they’ll consider running.”

Last November, Calgary-North West MLA Sandra Jansen quit the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race to join the governing NDP after she was allegedly harassed at a party’s convention in Red Deer.

Cuthbertson says this type of harassment – especially on social media – prevents some women from running for office.

“It’s the lack of seeing people like them in office that tends to make women not even think about running – not even think that politics might even be for them,” Cuthbertson said. “It’s also a little bit of a deterrent these days in terms of women seeing how social media and the media are treating other female politicians – that can be scary, so we’re hoping to approach that.”

Equal Voice’s approach is already bearing positive results. One local woman credits this campaign to her decision to run in the upcoming municipal elections.

“To kind of move from thinking about it, to actually putting in papers and getting things rolling – it's exciting to have a school like Equal Voice is putting on today that gives you the details on how to make that come to a reality,” Dawn Newton said.