Winning the Battle One Girl at a Time

     My name is Suzanne Barry, and I am going to be a senior in high school this fall. Like many high schools across the country, my school requires a final seminar type of credit for all seniors. Ours consists of a large project. This kind of sounds like it wouldn't be too fun, right? 35 hours of research, 35 hours of service, and countless other requirements...Well, it surprisingly isn't that bad. The project is extremely open-ended; you can basically choose any topic you can think of to base your project around. But that didn't necessarily make it easy for me to decide. I had thousands of ideas running through my head. Finally, I was able to focus in on something that I feel had a very significant impact on my life thus far: Self-Esteem and Confidence. I remember countless times when I came home from school crying because I had been made fun of due to my appearance or because I idolized athletes rather than supermodels. I wasn't your typical girl. I would have rather played with a basketball than a Barbie doll, and it took me until recently to realize that it was okay to be that way. For my project, I really wanted to look at what caused me and other girls like me to lack self-esteem and confidence. For my community service aspect, I knew just where to go.
     Karen, my mentor, has been working with kids for many years through Girls Inc. and the city's Recreation Department. Immediately upon my expression of interest in helping out at her Girls Inc. Summer Camp, Karen has taken me under her wing to help me make my project special and impactful not only in my life, but in the lives of the girls she sees on a daily basis. In my proposal for my project, I talked a lot about "winning the battle one girl at a time." Confidence is a tricky concept to address and measure an impact, but if I can make a difference to one girl I meet this summer and be a positive role model to her, I will feel as if my project was worthwhile.



The motto of Girls Inc. is to empower young girls to reach their full
potential by being strong, smart, and bold.



   So all summer starting on June 21, I will be volunteering at Girls Inc. on Thursdays and Fridays. Thursdays are field trip days, so it looks like I will be making a lot of trips to the beach. And as for Fridays, I will be helping organize "camp activities!" I will also being doing a lot of research hoping to answer the question of "how does having a positive role model impact the self-esteem of young girls?" You can expect to see posts from me up on here every weekend so that all of my wonderful readers can follow me on my journey to win the battle one girl at a time.