I Am Sixteen, Going on Seventeen

Well, actually, I'm just sixteen -- my birthday was on Saturday -- but that's beside the point. The point is that when you're my age, it can be, at times, hard to feel as though you can really make a difference.

I can't even vote, so how do I expect to be able to change the world? The answer -- one school at a time.

I wouldn't describe myself as fearless. Hardly. I'm scared of a lot of things -- rejection, loneliness, failure. I think it's more of the fact that I've learned to put my fears aside; I've learned to walk in long strides, even when I'm not sure if the ground might give out beneath me. I've stopped taking the baby steps and started leaping. I may fall and tumble and have to get back up again, but it's much better than not trying in the first place.

I am the founder of Girls for Girls, International, an organization dedicated to helping young women in developing countries gain access to the education that they need and deserve in order to grow up to be strong and successful women. I am also sixteen years old.

It started with my wanting to do something great. I wanted, I still want, to make a difference in the world. So I approached a teacher and asked her if she would be interested in being the advisor for a new club at my all-girls school, Marlborough. I found out about an organization that looked really promising, Women for Women International. Their mission is to help women in war-torn countries recover, and, since I go to an all-girls school, I thought that it might be great to start a chapter of that organization at Marlborough. Martha Schuur, who is now Girls for Girls, International's faculty advisor on the Board of Directors, suggested that I might look into building a girls' school in a country that doesn't usually educate girls. This option sent me down a new and very exciting path.

I had a sudden revelation about a week later. Lying in bed one night, it dawned on me that I didn't need to form a chapter of an already existing organization; I could form my own organization. Holding onto the desire to build a school and a nonprofit organization, I proceeded to spend much of my free time researching what countries were in the greatest need of girls' education. I contacted a colleague of my father's friend, who had worked with girls in Africa and started her own program in Kenya. Over the phone, I told her of my plan -- to build a school. I was very quickly shot down. I was told that it's near to impossible to start a school or program in Africa when you aren't actually in Africa. That really, I probably couldn't follow through with my plan. It was just too difficult.

That conversation definitely wasn't ego-boosting, but I didn't let it stop me. After all, I figured, it would be giving up to stop before I really began. Instead, as a club, we just reconfigured our plans. Instead of building a school, we decided that we would support an already existing one. We picked the Nyaka AIDS Orphans School, a school for AIDS orphans in Nyakagyezi, Uganda, and we started a pen pal correspondence between the girls in Girls for Girls and the students at Nyaka.

The next logical step in becoming a full-fledged nonprofit organization was filling out the 501(c)(3) form. Luckily, the father of one of the members of Girls for Girls is an attorney, and he agreed to help us with it. But then we began to run into roadblocks. It costs five hundred dollars to file one of the forms, I was told. We don't have five hundred dollars. We need to have five thousand dollars in order to become nonprofit. We definitely don't have five thousand dollars. We just don't have enough money.

But foundations won't give us grants unless we have the 501(c)(3), I replied. It will be much harder to get any money unless we get the tax-exempt status. We have to do this, no matter what it takes. In September, Girls for Girls, International was an idea. Now, in May, it's an organization. An organization with a mission statement, a website, and a Board of Directors. And it is thanks to our perseverance that we have gotten this far. If I had given in to the fear of failure, had backed down when something didn't work as successfully as I planned, I never would have had the opportunity to feel the joy that I felt when I printed Girls for Girls, International's first official brochure.

Girls for Girls, International is becoming something solely because my classmates and I imagined it. And we kept imagining it and imagining it and remembering that sometimes, on your way to the top of a mountain, there might be some rocks on the path. And through this project, I've discovered that I am willing to trip over those rocks; it just makes reaching the top seem all the more worth it.

Last Tuesday, Girls for Girls held a really successful fundraiser in support of the Nyaka AIDS Orphans School. We raised over four thousand dollars -- far exceeding our goal for the night. Next year, the students at the Nyaka AIDS Orphans School will be playing basketball on a court that we built. They will be reading books that we've bought and using mathematical sets that we've provided.

Their lives will be richer because of our gifts. But our lives have been enriched even more.

UPDATE: All donations are tax-deductible and should be made out to STSAD Inc/Nyaka AIDS Orphans School. They should be sent to Girls for Girls, International, c/o Marlborough School, Attn: Martha Schuur 250 S. Rossmore, Los Angeles, CA 90004