My “Why”: Becoming a Global Advocate for girls’ education
Every since I was born, I knew that I wanted to make this world a better place. Growing up, I would throw myself passionately into every new cause or issue I learned about. I was our local library’s youngest ever volunteer at 9 years old and spent every 4th of July in elementary school forcing my friends and younger brother to sell Kool-Aid to raise money for the Animal Humane Society (and then wrote a book about it to help other young philanthropists do the same). I designed buttons and started a campaign to educate the St. Croix River watershed community about the dangers of invasive zebra mussels. I cooked and delivered meals to a group home for people living with HIV/AIDS. I wanted to do it all.
By the time I was in college, majoring in Peace Studies, I was still struggling with how to focus my passions in order to have the greatest impact. As I spent long hours in the library reading about civil wars, genocides, natural disasters and neo-colonialism and seeing how the atrocities of human history repeated themselves again and again, I was overwhelmed by the seeming hopelessness of it all.
Then, my senior year, I spent a semester abroad in Mali in a program on gender and community empowerment. For my senior thesis, I performed field research on girls’ education in a few rural villages, interviewing girls, teachers, parents, and elders about the impact that educated girls had had on their community. As I heard their stories of girls who had gone on to be leaders in their communities and beyond, using their opportunity to pursue their passions to help others do the same, I realized that by focusing on this one issue of girls’ education I could have an infinite impact on all of the causes I cared so deeply about. There was hope — I found it in the faces of the mothers and fathers proud of their daughters, in the female teacher who spent extra time with the girls in her class to ensure they felt confident in their studies, and in the girls themselves as they told me about the hardships they had overcome in order to be standing in front of me in their school uniforms.
This is my why. I believe that when girls are valued, trusted, and invested in, they have the power to make this world a better place.
I’ve seen this over and over in my career since leaving college: I saw it in the high schoolers who spoke out at the United Nations and demanded that girls be included and centered at all levels of international policy; I saw it in the middle schoolers in Thailand who passionately and creatively fundraised for victims of Typhoon Haiyan when it devastated their neighbors in the Philippines; I saw it in the members of the Girl Scout Leadership Board in Minnesota, who took the lead in providing relevant programming for their peers.
No, educating girls isn’t automatically going to save the world. Even in countries where girls are educated at the same rates as boys, girls and women face violence, unequal pay, and countless forms of discrimination in politics, policy, education, sports, business, health, and all other aspects of their lives. But for those girls who otherwise wouldn’t have access, a quality education combined with support networks, opportunities to lead, access to resources and cross-national efforts to effect positive societal and political change can lead to an incredibly enriched future for all of us.
I want every girl to be able to be a part of the movement to make this world a better place. That’s why I’m honored to begin my role as a Global Advocate with MAMA HOPE, partnering with Nurturing Minds and the SEGA Girls School in Tanzania, where they provide a high-quality, holistic education to empower girls to effect change for themselves, their families and communities, and — ultimately — the world.
Choose hope. Be a part of the change: donate today.
