LYNNWOOD—On Saturday, March 15, Project Girl held a youth conference at the Verdant Wellness Center, just blocks from their Lynnwood City Center headquarters. At no cost to attendees, the advocacy and mentorship group for young women of color provided workshops, speakers, and entertainment, as well as an opportunity for those in attendance to make “lasting connections” in the Puget Sound area.
Around 70 middle school and high school girls attended with their mothers in tow, mingling with old and new faces alike. Part of Project Girl’s mission is to provide a nurturing environment for girls to “establish healthy relationships,” and the fast friendships that form within its community are a testament to this. As Lynnwood Times reporter Emily Chu wrote in 2023, “one can’t help but feel the love and encouragement of a sisterhood within its walls.”
Though Project Girl’s work is based in South Snohomish County, attendees represented the region at large, from the Lake Stevens School District down to Seattle Public Schools.
Project Girl team member Jae Williams spoke about the focus of Saturday’s conference, which was titled “Unlocking Your Power Within.” Besides fostering a supportive community, Project Girl invites young women to look inside themselves for motivation. “The idea is really just helping girls understand their inner power… whether or not anything changes in them today, they have power and they’re still gonna have that power at the end of the day,” Williams said. “So we’re really just trying to help them find that and understand the value of their voice.”
Through multiple breakout sessions, girls in attendance explored different channelings of their internal strength. Mentors taught the concepts of “visionary power” and “emotional power” – setting long-term goals and finding the resilience to achieve them – and hoped to inspire thought-provoking communication through the concepts of “creative power” and “social power.”
A featured instructor was Musu Bakoto Sawo, a Gambian lawyer and womens’ rights advocate. Her workshop, “Resilience in the Face of Adversity”, couldn’t have come from a more personal source: by her early 20s, she had survived female genital mutilation (FGM) and an arranged marriage before finding her current path through education.
Sawo now works as the Director of Fundraising and Grants for the Community Foundation of Snohomish County, based in Everett. In an interview, she said that her experience as a mentor in The Gambia created a natural transition to girls’ mentorship in the United States. “I could not say no,” Sawo said about speaking with Project Girl. “Someone like me wasn’t meant to make it this far in life. My resilience helped me be here. The discipline, the commitment… being able to change that narrative coming from a country or community where women are undervalued.”
Taking the moment to educate, Sawo stated that issues like FGM are not solely an “African problem”, as is commonly assumed. Around 25,000 girls in WA state are “living with or at risk of FGM”, per the state Department of Health, and “the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area has the 5th highest rate of adults and children at risk in the U.S.”
Sawo told the Lynnwood Times that she aimed to provide “resonance” in her speech, helping American girls contextualize the global challenges of gender inequality and gender-based violence from the Pacific Northwest to West Africa.
Other speakers discussed the benefits of Project Girl’s mentorship programs, which are intended to provide girls of color with specific guidance and resources to combat “deep-seated disparities.” Citing research from the NoVo Foundation, Project Girl’s website states that Black American girls specifically are “six times more likely to be suspended in school than their white peers,” and also face a higher statistical risk of sexual harassment and child abuse.
With “over 2000 mentees reached”, the nonprofit work of Project Girl aims to defy the statistics and mold as many marginalized young women as possible into success stories.
Author: Kayvon Bumpus
