Girls Write Now

This week in the media I came across a great non profit organization that I’d never heard of, girls write now. This organization pairs underprivileged and at risk New York high school girls with professional women writers as mentors, who teach the girls writing skills and how to make good decisions about life, school and careers. These girls are taught in weekly meetings and workshops arranged by their mentors. To help learn writing skills and foster their creativity the girls are encouraged to write their memoirs. The fact is that of the at risk girls that this program targets only 42% of white, 16% of black and of 22% of Hispanic female students read at their grade level. Programs like this are particularly valuable to this demographic if we ever want them to succeed and go to college. Believe it or not we still need more literacy programs in the U.S. today. This organization began in 1998 and 100% of the seniors who have been involved in this program have gone to college.
They teach the girls to write poems, fiction and non-fiction, also teaching them to fill out college applications and entrance essays. All of the mentors are volunteers and all of the money for this program is created by donors.
I believe that this kind of community service is vital to women gaining power and better careers in the future, if we give back and help out those less fortunate than ourselves then we can help create a better tomorrow for all of us and in this case, women in general.
I think that this program should be offered in every city. This service would be beneficial to the feminist movement and greatly help these girls make better life decisions, careers choices, and be more productive citizens in society overall becoming more powerful women.