A little girl attending the “Play like a girl: A girl empowerment panel” flips through a photo series by Kate T. Parker, which was later adapted into a book and then into a guided journal. The event, hosted at Avid Bookshop, was organized by Strong Girls Serve co-founders Rachel Greb and Kim Turner and focused on inspiring young girls to pursue their passions. “I was so impressed with all of these girls. They are such role models and they’re so young,” Parker said. “I was not that put together and that focused when I was their age. It kind of gave me hope. I was really proud to be up there with them.” Photo by Mackenzie Caudill
Members of local non-profit, Strong Girls Serve, gathered at Avid Bookshop to listen to a panel of female athletes speak on their passions and empower the girls in the audience to strive towards their goals.
The local youth organization Strong Girls Serve, founded by Rachel Greb and Kim Turner, partnered with Avid Bookshop to host a panel of former University of Georgia athletes on Dec. 7. The event was held at Avid to promote photographer and former collegiate soccer player Kate T. Parker’s sequel to her best-selling book “Strong Is the New Pretty”, “Strong Is the New Pretty: A Guided Journal for Girls”.
“We had an event with Kate T. Parker for her first book ‘Strong Is the New Pretty’ and two of our strong girls are in the book, including Kim’s daughter, and when we heard about the journal, right away we knew we wanted to do an event again and what better way to have this event than with female athletes,” Greb said.
Parker, along with four current and former female athletes, including track and field Olympian and 2018 NCAA Woman of the Year Keturah Orji, sat down in front of a crowd of 30 people to discuss what motivates them, what they’re passionate about and how the young girls in the audience can cultivate their interests, all of which are major themes in “Strong Is the New Pretty: A Guided Journal for Girls”.
“(The guided journal) is basically taking the ideas of instilling confidence and girls finding their voice that I used in ‘Strong is the new pretty’ the book and taking them and putting them into action,” Parker said. “So, giving girls actual things they can do on a daily basis to get stronger and to challenge themselves and to find their passions.”
Parker came out with “Strong Is the New Pretty” in March of 2017 and says she wrote the book for young girls because of the way she’s seen women negatively portrayed in the media.
“I am a mom of two daughters and I saw the images I would see of girls and women on social media was like 99 percent of it was not real,” Parker said. “There’s no authenticity and there’s no real girls in there, so I wanted to show my girls that who they were, which was messy and dirty and their hair wasn’t brushed, that that was okay.”
Greb also believes young girls are brought up in a toxic environment, so she and Turner operate Strong Girls Serve for young woman from the kindergarten level through high school to have a safe environment where they can be themselves and do what they love.
“I thought about the way I grew up, girls were taught to compete against each other,” Greb said. “We were not always given the best opportunity to do things, so I think creating an environment where girls can be themselves, learn about being themselves, but also empower each other along the way is why I wanted to do it.”
The panel was moderated by Clarke Central High School parent Deirdre Sugiuchi, who believes the answers the panelists gave inspired the young audience.
“My son, (CCHS senior) Harvey, is an athlete. I really enjoyed hearing about each athlete’s experience participating in sports and reflecting on what challenges they faced, particularly as women. I also enjoyed learning how engaging in sports has helped them succeed in life,” Sugiuchi said. “Some of them spoke about regretting spending too much time on sports. I thought that was really interesting, given that they are all so accomplished. Mostly, I enjoyed hearing about how playing sports helped give them confidence to pursue other endeavors.”
CCHS parent Alexander Sams serves on the Clarke County Mentor Program Board along with Turner and attended the panel with his daughter.
“I’m a father of a high school girl and a college girl, both athletes, and I’ve seen the accomplishment that they have made because of athletic opportunities,” Sams said. “The panel was made up of some amazing women and it is always important for kids to see the result of hard work and use of talent. I really appreciated their confidence in who they are. They are badass people, who happen to be girls. They were born with an athletic gift and they didn’t waste it.”
At the end of the panel the questions turned to the young girls in the audience who were eager to tell the women on the panel what they love to do. Greb believes the event successfully incorporated Parker’s ideas and the experiences of real life role models into a productive discussion.
“I think (the event) was fantastic. When you think a lot of times of having a panel for a book, you don’t think about young girls coming, but to see all of these young girls and to see them be able to look up to somebody; if you can see it you can be it,” Greb said. “To be able to believe in yourself and believe that you can do whatever and seeing these girls doing it or these women doing it on the panel, I think is so inspirational. And you can hear in the way after when they talked about their passions and it wasn’t all sports, it was art, it was drawing, it was reading. They saw that you can have passion and you can believe in something.”
