In theory, you could bake a million cupcakes to raise a million dollars to make a social change. She's the First has preliminary evidence. Consider this: With just a couple hundred student teams behind our campaign, we have already raised...

Once upon a Saturday in Brooklyn, three young women walked into the Brooklyn High School of the Arts auditorium, although very different paths led them there.

Girl #1 was a tall redhead, probably in her early 20s, who ventured out of her apartment on this damp, gloomy afternoon in pursuit...

When Lindsay Brown, a junior at the University of Notre Dame, decided to host a bake sale in her dorm last year to fundraise for girls' education at the Kopila Valley Children's School, she had no idea that she was launching a movement. But her success, raising $900...

How do you take an event for 400 people, produced entirely by an all-volunteer, under-age-30 team, in the most expensive city in the U.S., and get an entire nation excited about it, so that you can raise at least $20,000 to sponsor 42 girls in a developing world country, where...

Never underestimate the potential of a tweet. Without one special tweet from @shesthefirst two weeks ago, there would not have been eight girls inside a Brooklyn classroom yesterday, filling the room with their voices, pouring laughter into the silent halls, which were otherwise empty on spring break week....

Girls around the world fascinate me endlessly. Although I'm 25, I'm able to develop a bond, and an awareness of their dreams, through social media. I'm focused on girls in my day job, where I tweet for a teen magazine, and after hours, when I'm burning the midnight oil working...

I never knew E.B. White -- he died 2 months, 19 days before I was born -- but as a girl, I grew up with his classic story of "Charlotte's Web." Later, as copy editor of my college newspaper, I scrupulously followed his rules of punctuation and grammar from "The...

Although you can't remember it, you've probably seen photos of your first birthday party: you in a highchair, wearing a cone hat strapped around your chin, seated behind a frosted cake inscribed with your name and adorned with a waxy '1' candle. Do you ever wonder what your parents and...

At LA's Prom Closet's annual giveaway event in Los Angeles, 200 high school girls who couldn't afford prom dresses received them for free. They scoured through racks bursting with colorful tulle and taffeta to choose their dream dress. Long, elegant gowns, some embellished with sparkly stones and sequins,...

There's a pin tacked to my bulletin board that says "Make Cupcakes, Not War," bought from Johnny Cupcakes, the indie clothing brand. It's a cute spin on the "Make Love, Not War" buttons of 1960s American counterculture, but it's not a complete joke. From what I've seen, cupcakes...

It's rather ambitious to start a trend these days, if you're not a celebrity or a Twitter hash tag. But I'm going to give it a shot anyhow -- I'm declaring 2010 the Year of Rice Dinners. My goal: to feed 100 children in Liberia for one year, at the...

There's a trifecta of causes that I embrace -- child development in Liberia, prom dress donations, and girls' education -- each a very different labor of love. But they all share a single guiding light, a legendary editor whose mantra for her magazine became...

There are many New Yorkers who lead "double lives," as Time Out New York reported in an issue earlier this year. I can relate. I'm a prom Web site editor who in my after-hours and weekends doubles as director of the MacDella Cooper Foundation, a charity supporting orphans...

If we were to play a little free association, and you asked me to say the first thing that "December" brings to mind, I probably wouldn't say Christmas, yuletide greetings, or chestnuts roasting by an open fire. My brain, at least since 2007, thinks "prom."

Every year in December,