Stand Up. Speak Up. Rise Up.
A hush quickly fell over the crowd of girls surrounding me. While everyone was craning their necks for a better view, I had only one thought: “This is so. freaking. cool.” A second later, the group erupted into applause. The First Lady took the podium.
Michelle Obama’s inspiring speech occurred on the second day of the organization Girl Up’s three-day-long Leadership Summit in Washington D.C., and she was just one of many exciting speakers. 225 passionate attendees gathered from across the country (and world) to hear from members of the U.S. government and UN agencies as well as representatives from major media outlets and corporations. We engaged in hands-on workshops and even stormed Capitol Hill on Lobby Day. I gained much from this experience, but took away a couple of important lessons in particular.
First, I realized that individual empowerment is crucial to women’s overall empowerment. A few speakers especially drove this point home. My journalist-slash-feminist idol Elizabeth Plank, a Senior editor at Mic.com, gave a a presentation aptly titled “Find Your Inner Beyonce,” and spoke about the importance of young women’s confidence. Young entrepreneur and bra designer extraordinaire, Yellowberry founder Megan Grassel, also emphasized the importance of taking yourself seriously as a young woman and encouraged us to be resilient in the face of setbacks. Another speaker, Ishana, summed up this theme well when she said, “You can’t empower others without first empowering yourself.”
I also appreciated the summit’s focus on educating girls. As part of the U.S. government’s commitment to “Let Girls Learn,” First Lady Michelle Obama and the Peace Corps have formed a powerful collaboration to expand access to education for adolescent girls around the world. At the summit, the First Lady spoke of leveraging the power of girls everywhere through education.
“You all are here today because someone believed in you, because someone gave you the chance to be everything you were meant to be,” she said. “That’s what a good education does. And when we give girls around the world that kind of opportunity, it doesn’t just transform their lives, it transforms their families, their communities, and their entire countries.”
We weren’t just told that education is important, however, but were given the opportunity to advocate for it ourselves. In meetings with staffers from both the House and Senate sides, Girl Up participants used the knowledge gained from the summit to speak about the need for girls’ education to be prioritized on our national agenda.
Ultimately, this summit filled me with optimism about a whole new generation of #sheros — an energy I will use to motivate my own work and empower others.
Girl Up, the United Nations Foundation’s adolescent girl campaign, supports the empowerment of girls everywhere. Since its launch in 2010, the campaign has funded UN programs that promote the health, safety, education, and leadership of girls in developing countries and built a community of nearly half a million passionate advocates. Girl Up youth leaders, representing more than 1,000 Girl Up Clubs in 66 countries, stand up, speak up, and rise up to support the hardest to reach girls living in places where it is hardest to be a girl.