She's Doing It: Barbara Strachan Gives Girls of Incarcerated Moms Hope

FBI Director Robert Mueller presents GSACPC’s Barb Strachan with the Community Leadership Award.I still have my Girl Scout badge sash and a newspaper article about the year my father chaired the cookie sale in Temple, TX. I was in junior high school and looked pretty dorky in the photo, wearing my full green regalia. Daddy–never one to do anything in a small way–bought 12 dozen boxes of cookies. The freezer was packed with Thin Mints and those butter cookies I love with tea, and my friends knew what they’d be having for snacks at my house for the next year.

But enough of that. Today’s Girl Scouts are doing much more interesting things. “She’s Doing It” this week features Barbara Strachan, the Program Director of Girl Scouts Beyond Bars (GSBB) for the Arizona Cactus-Pine Girl Scout Council

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Best of International Women's Day: Be a Front Porch Lady

How did you recognize the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day March 8? If you haven’t yet signed the “Million for a Billion” petition to tell Congress you want them to fund international family planning and save the lives of so many women and children around the world, please do so here. This is one meaningful way to honor the women who founded IWD to promote equality for women, including the right to vote and hold public office. Another is to reach out to help another woman. Today’s guest post from Kathy Korman Frey, entrepreneur in residence at George Washington University School of Business and founder of The Hot Mommas Project tells just such a story. Read on, and keep reading for a roundup of some of the best of IWD posts:

A dignified, beautiful, African-American woman stood at the podium during the Wake Forest Women’s Weekend. All eyes were on Esther Silver-Parker, one of the most senior former executives at Wal-Mart and now president of the Silver-Parker Group. Would she talk about women’s advancement to the C-suite? Would she share her secrets to success? That, she did. And one of them was not at all what we expected.

Silver-Parker grew up in rural North Carolina, in a two-bedroom house, with her parents and many siblings. She recounted a screenplay-like story about a group of women she called: The Front Porch Ladies. “The Front Porch Ladies were the women who sat on their front porches as we came home from school,” Silver-Parker said. “They would treat our business like it was their business.”

When Silver-Parker was accepted to college, imagine her surprise when the Front Porch Ladies showed up on her front porch. There they all stood, having brought with them a full set of blue luggage for her to take off to school. “From time to time at college, I would get letters from the Front Porch Ladies,” Silver-Parker told the audience. “They would write words of encouragement, and sometimes include a dollar or two.”

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Want to Help Start a Girlution?

My friend Tamara Kreinin (pictured here), who is executive director of the United Nations Foundation Women and Population program,  sent me several e-mails during the last couple of weeks announcing that she was about to begin blogging. Seemed a little quaint that she was fretting about whether she was getting the art of the blogpost right, given that I get messages from e-consultants daily telling me blogging is already dead.

Well, you and I know blogging is alive and well. So all of you  who can’t fit an entire story into a 140-character tweet or a text, please join me in welcoming Tamara to the international league of bloggers. I am delighted to cheer on the inspiring new girls’ movement she’s initiated by re-publishing her first blogpost as a guest post here at Heartfeldt. If you want to help the Girlution in the U.S. and overseas, check out the Girl Up website to learn how.

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Help Girls Make Change

Friends, I received this from Tara Roberts, a young woman with a mission to empower girls that I think is so worthy. I’ve voted and encourage you to do so too.

I traveled around the world interviewing girl and young women change makers for 10 months last year. Now, I hope to create an interactive online network called “girltank” to connect these dynamic young women and support them in changing the world.

And all I need is your vote. By October 31st. For a $15K grant to build the site.

The site will offer video clips of the young women, forums, blogs, how-to podcasts, a resource directory, and online workshops. Each element will allow the young women to get to know each other, grow their capacity as leaders, learn more about areas that have a global impact on women, and receive support around their work to change the world. I also hope the site will inspire other girls and young women to get involved.

I promise that it will be very exciting! 🙂

Thanks in advance for your help!

http://youtopia2010.uservoice.com/forums/81825-youth-issues

(Psssst – And feel free to pass the word!)

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Why Would a 14-Year-Old Feminist Support Hillary?

Thanks to Deborah Siegel who blogs at Girl With Pen for this inspiring article, written by Samantha French, age 14, and a student at Writopia Lab, a writing enrichment program located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It’s always intriguing to learn how political opinions are formed, and this young women clearly has a mind of her own–and better yet, she talks publicly about what she believes.

As we all know, the buzz around America’s college campuses is Barack Obama and how he represents change for America. According to the media, he has overwhelming appeal to the country’s so-called “youth.” And it’s true. The phrase “yes we can” is being inhaled faster than pot brownies and Jell-O shots at a frat party. However, what the media seems to be consistently ignoring is the opinions of the country’s real, good old-fashioned, disenfranchised youth: high school students. Who are almost unanimously pro-Hillary.

OK, so I’m dreaming.

As a female freshman in Bard High School Early College, one of New York’s more liberal high schools where nearly two-thirds of the student body are females, there is not huge support for Hillary, which makes me sad. Many people at Bard, both male and female, support Obama because they are “tired of the Clintons” (a notion which they have obviously been fed by their parents. Think about it: the last time a Clinton was in office they were eight at the very most).

At first, I agreed with them. My dad’s a die-hard Obama supporter and so are a lot of my friends. But the turning point came for me when I saw how upset and truly devoted Hillary was to the race after her defeat at the Iowa caucus. The moment that the cameras revealed her sad eyes, I realized that I was seeing in her something rarely seen in any presidential candidate: a human being. While my father continued to be very pro-Obama (re-recording Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock,” titled, I Want Barak,)—and put pressure on me to agree with him—I felt a connection with Hillary after that night.

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