“What I really love about Girls Inc. is that we get to express our own opinions,” Addie Currier, a sixth-grader at O’Keeffe Middle School, tells Madison365. “We get to speak out in class and express ourselves. It’s also helped me feel more confident about speaking about my feelings and how I feel about being a girl in this school. Girls Inc. has helped me feel like a leader and more confident in myself.”
Addie meets regularly with other girls from O’Keeffe at Girls Inc., a national program that develops research-based informal education programs encouraging girls to take risks and master physical, intellectual and emotional challenges.
Passion McClain, the Girls Inc. outreach facilitator at Goodman Community Center, has been working with youth overall for 10 years and with Girls Inc. at O’Keeffe, grades 6-8, for the last two.
“It’s been really interesting and fun working with this group of girls at O’Keeffe,” McClain tells Madison365. “I do Girls Inc. here at O’Keeffe and also at Whitehorse [Middle School]. My numbers grow all the time. Here at O’Keeffe I have almost 30 girls.”
Emily Koch, assistant principal at O’Keeffe Middle School, says that this year they’ve expanded Girls Inc from lunch and recess by adding an additional 6th-grade class that meets twice a week.
“For this program, we reached out to some of our girls who show a lot of leadership potential,” Koch tells Madison365. “The goal is for them to come together as a group of young women and learn to find and use their voice to advocate for issues that are important to them.
“While working with Passion [McClain], who serves as a powerful female role model, they learn to collaborate and communicate; they reflect on their own growth, and they celebrate their individual and group accomplishments,” she adds. “The group has been an amazing addition to O’Keeffe and I have seen a direct impact on the students who are enrolled in the course. We are very grateful for Passion, [Girls Inc. of Greater Madison Assistant Manager] Cora Kruzicki and the rest of the team at Girls Inc and hope to continue to build on our partnership.”
In 2017, nearly 600 girls — from elementary to high school — participated in Girls Inc. at 14 schools and community centers throughout Madison.
“Our program has inspired our girls to be smart, strong and bold and so a lot of things that we’ve been focusing on this school year is self-love, being a leader, and how girls are represented in the media,” McClain says. “We do have a curriculum base, so we’ve been doing our leadership curriculum.”
On this particular day at O’Keeffe Middle School, McClain was getting ready for an anthropology professor to come in and speak to the girls.
“We’ve had a variety of different women come in and speak to us. We’ve had an author, a sociologist on gender women studies … we’ve had a woman who was a welder come in. That was pretty cool,” Addie remarks.
“We do many things where we get to meet inspirational women. Last week, I took my girls to see [political commentator, champion for civil rights, and budding entrepreneur] Angela Rye [at UW-Madison],” McClain says. “I’ve been trying to focus on a lot of leadership things. I want the girls to see that they can do more than the quote-unquote ‘baking’ and other stuff that girls like to do.
“It is Black History Month, so we’re going to be doing head wraps. We did some African dishes for Black History Month and we’ve been focusing on different agricultural things for black history,” McClain continues. “With this class, in general, we’re focusing on girls leading and being strong, smart, and bold.”
The Goodman Community Center is the Madison affiliate for Girls Inc. and is expanding the network of local programs and supporting these programs in a variety of ways. Their goal is to increase Girls Inc. programming in Madison neighborhood organizations and schools and to be serving up to 900 girls by 2020.
“We’re looking to serve 178 girls in this school so we have different projects to do,” McClain says. “We are going to do eight different events at O’Keeffe which is very hard, but we’re going to do it. We’re planning our first one today. It’s going to be a lunch-survey discussion base. And we’re going to be doing a SurveyMonkey.”
“Our survey is mostly about how you feel in the school about girls and what you think is happening at our school with girls. Questions like: Do you feel like a leader? Do you feel confident in yourself? Do you think the media affects how girls are treated in school? Stuff like that,” Addie says.
At Girls Inc., the girls address topics like math and science education, pregnancy and drug abuse prevention, media literacy, economic literacy, adolescent health, violence prevention, and sports participation. Over time, the girls have become a family.
“We really feel like a family here at Girls Inc. I would say sisterhood. I really want the girls to feel like we are a school family and that we will always be there … If someone is down, we’re going to lift you back up,” McClain says. “I try to create that safe zone so when I’m sitting at school they can come to me and have a conversation about anything – their teachers, their parents, their peers. I think we do a pretty good job of building that family atmosphere.”
“At the start of Girls Inc., I didn’t really feel like I knew a lot of the people but now I feel like I’ve gotten closer with some of the girls in Girls Inc.,” Addie adds. “We can really talk to each other and not be ashamed of what we’re saying. We can speak out and be ourselves in Girls Inc.”
McClain says that for the Girls Inc. Celebration of International Women’s Day coming up, Girls Inc. will be doing something called a “Yay! Scale.”
“With our project, the Yay! Scale is a regular scale that you stand on and instead of giving you the numbers, it will say ‘You’re groovy’ or “You’re cool’ or ‘You’re beautiful.’ It will be something more inspirational versus breaking your spirit when you see it,” she says.
About 100 girls from Girls Inc. will be present at the Girls Inc. of Madison’s gala dinner and celebration on March 7 at Overture Center for the Arts. It’s a great opportunity for guests, community members and stakeholders to interact with the girls from the program Madison365 is proud to be the media sponsor of the event. Tickets for the event are on sale now.
“I’m really excited for the event. It’s nerve-wracking. It’s a lot of work. We are doing headwraps so all of my sixth-grade girls will be wearing headwraps with me for the event to stand out,” McClain says. “It’s exciting to show our community how much work we’ve put into what we’re doing right now and to our class and our school community.”
Are you excited, too, Addie?
“Very! It should be a lot of fun,” she replies. “It’s an event that we’re all looking forward to.”
Celebrate Girls Inc. of Greater Madison at its gala dinner on March 7 at Overture Center for the Arts. Tickets for the event are on sale now. Individual tickets are $60 and a table is $500.
