GirlSpring
Through social gatherings, mentoring, workshops and now virtual space, GirlSpring has been empowering young women for more than a decade
Kristin Meriam teaches middle school in Homewood and has twin daughters — Lydia and Chloe Bloodworth, so if there’s one thing she knows, it’s teenage girls.
So when she advocates for GirlSpring, a nonprofit group dedicated to empowering girls, she’s speaking from experience.
“I’d encourage anybody who is in favor of girl empowerment to get involved. It was a great experience for my daughters,” she said. “I think the experience helped them along the way to college and having confidence going into college and applying for colleges, applying for college scholarships. I think the whole experience helped them a lot through middle school and high school.”
Meriam got her girls involved with GirlSpring around 2015 when they were both in middle school, after looking into the program at the request of GirlSpring Executive Director Kristen Greenwood. “I thought it was really impressive that she was putting together this website with topics of interest to girls,” Meriam said.
Meriam’s daughters had already been involved in Girl Scouts, but she found the smaller organization more responsive to the needs and interests of the girls in the program, she said. “There were just lots more opportunities for the girls to lead. The website is made up of girl-created content, and [they] got to follow their interests.” Her daughter Lydia went from doing online quizzes on the GirlSpring site, to taking charge of the quiz function, to taking on more leadership roles among the girls, she said.
“They gained a lot of confidence. They gained great experience with not just creating content to put on the website, but working with the company that does the website. Conversing with the so-called Wonder Women — GirlSpring puts on talks by women in different careers, and that was really interesting for them. The fundraising party that they do each year, the girls played a role in that, and they just gave a lot of confidence through the whole process,” Meriam said.
Another important benefit for her daughters was “working with girls from other high schools in the area and having that kind of broader base of people to work with, she said. I think it was helpful to them to get out of just the social life of their individual high school and meet girls from other high schools in the area.”
Thousands of girls across the metro area have made connections — in person and virtually — through GirlSpring since it was founded in 2010, Executive Director Kristen Greenwood said. The nonprofit organization is totally focused on empowering young women in ways they might not otherwise experience.
“We know that girls don’t necessarily get all the skills they need to succeed in the classroom, not because they don’t have great teachers, but because they are focused on academics, which is very important,” Greenwood said. “But girls and women face challenges in life that they need to know how to navigate. Whether it is career or family, or both, there are things that girls need to know that aren’t taught in school.”
Greenwood talked to The Homewood Star about how GirlSpring got started, and why it’s so important.
Q: What does GirlSpring do and why?
A: Our mission is to empower girls 9-18 with the tools they need to succeed in life: accurate information, inspiring events and positive female role models.
Q: What does that look like in practice?
A: What this looks like in terms of programming is an online magazine and mobile app created and managed by a group of teen girls called the Springboarders, monthly talks led by female community leaders called Wonder Women that focus on topics ranging from how to succeed in careers (particularly male-dominated fields) to cybersecurity and financial literacy to nutrition and wellness, career and STEM fairs, film screenings, mother-daughter events and an annual summer camp.
Q: Give us an example.
A: Our largest ongoing program is the Springboarders teen program, which consists of 60 girls, 13-18, who are tasked with managing GirlSpring’s website, girlspring.com, which reaches 15,000 visitors per month, in Birmingham and beyond. The girls have varying roles of responsibility. At a minimum, each girl contributes some type of content to the site, such as an article on a topic relevant to their peers, a poem or artwork, or works with other team members to create a podcast or video interview with a female role model from the community.
There are also leadership roles such as chairs for the various committees (podcast, YouTube, etc.), and executive level (president, vice president and secretary). The girls work together to develop a monthly topic for their website submissions, create online events for their peers, such as trivia nights and peer-to-peer college prep advice panels, and periodically get together to have volunteer days. Girls are drawn from all different schools and backgrounds, so through this program they get exposure to girls from different walks of life, they learn how to work together as a team, develop leadership skills, and get to meet lots of inspiring women from our community that they might not otherwise meet.
Q: That would seem to touch on a lot of real-world skills.
A: In terms of volunteer opportunities, people often don’t realize how great this looks on a college application, but consistently the graduating seniors tell me that when they go for their college interviews or put this on scholarship applications, that it really stands out because it is a unique and different type of service. Even the girls who are participating at the minimum level and writing an article on a peer relevant topic, are helping another girl, just by having published something that might speak to her and knowing she’s not the only person dealing with that particular issue.
During COVID especially, we heard so many girls tell us what a great resource the website had been for them. People often want to hear about our events, which are wonderful, but the website, which is driven by this group of teen girls, is really at the heart of everything. There are resources written by professionals on certain topics, but 90% of the content is created by teen girls.
Q: How did GirlSpring get started?
A: GirlSpring was started by Jane Comer. She saw a lack of women in leadership positions and a need for more. She believed that by empowering girls, we build better communities, better businesses, better relationships and ultimately a better world. So, she started gathering input from women in Birmingham who felt similarly and founded GirlSpring as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2010.
Q: Tell us more about Jane Comer.
A: Jane has two passions: empowering girls and the arts. She is a native of Birmingham, and besides GirlSpring, she also started ArtPlay, which holds art, dance and music classes for children and adults and is housed in a restored 19th century house in Southside. She’s a lot of fun and also one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.
Q: How did you come to GirlSpring?
A: I worked at the Birmingham Museum of Art for many years and knew who Jane was, but didn’t really know her. One of my colleagues knew her well and knew about GirlSpring and introduced us. I fell in love with the mission immediately!
Q: How many girls does
GirlSpring serve?
A: It’s a hard question to answer, especially on grant applications. Through our in-person programs, where we actually see girls directly, about 1,000 per year from Birmingham and surrounding areas. Our biggest platform, however, is our website, which has, on average 15,000 visitors per month. Our website visitors ... could be from Birmingham, or they could be from anywhere across the globe.
Q: How do girls sign up?
A: There are many ways to get involved. We have a number of public programs — monthly events called Wonder Women talks, films, an annual STEM Fair and Career Fair, and a summer camp, but to “join” means to apply to our teen leadership program, the Springboarders. Springboarders must apply via an online application, be interviewed by a small peer group, commit to monthly meetings, and commit to submitting something to our website each month (an article, artwork, poetry, podcast, video).
Q: Did the pandemic change what you do in any way? If so, how?
A: Yes, when schools shut down and girls had more time at home, we saw a dramatic increase in traffic to our website — 30% within weeks. We went from 8,000 average visitors to 13,000 in several weeks. That’s continued to grow since then.
We had the largest Springboarder class since we started, and the pandemic actually was a huge booster for our growth. Girls were looking for resources online, and luckily they found us. The feedback we got from the girls we work with directly was that we also were a great source of structure when the rest of their world fell apart. Plus, reading articles written by peers going through the same thing made them feel they weren’t alone. Also, all of our in-person programs are now completely offered online.
Q: As the pandemic eases, what do you want to see change?
A: Getting people to recognize what a great resource our website and the virtual world can be when circumstances make it impossible for people to be together physically. For so many girls, having virtual programs has been wonderful because for a small town, we are pretty big. Depending on where you live, it can take an hour to get from one part of town to another, plus, with virtual programs, you eliminate barriers like lack of transportation that many households have to deal with.
Q: What’s been the best thing about working with GirlSpring?
A: Seeing all these young women from different backgrounds and schools come together to work towards a common goal. They all believe in empowering each other, in using their voices to help other girls. They are also all really nice girls — no cliques — it’s very inclusive. They want to see each other succeed.
Q: Tell us about a success story.
A: It’s hard to pick just one! When I first became executive director at GirlSpring, a set of twin sisters joined GirlSpring when they were entering ninth grade. They both stayed in the program all four years of high school and now are in their first year of college. Although they each had their own unique personalities, they were both quite shy when they started with GirlSpring, and I watched their confidence grow and saw them develop into leaders over the years. GirlSpring can’t take all the credit, but I know they used it on their college applications and scholarship applications, and both said they felt that it showed as such a unique experience, they felt it really helped and made their applications stand out.
Q: If there was one thing you’d want people to know about
GirlSpring, what would it be?
A: I think there is a perception that it is a website where girls publish their writing, artwork and poetry. That is only one component of what it is. Although that is important, and valued, I think what the girls get out of it is so much more. It’s the behind the scenes camaraderie of working together to decide on the theme for the month, it’s the women they get to meet as guest speakers at their meetings and the women they interview for podcasts and video interviews, the in-person events like the Wonder Women talks and the STEM fair and career fair and the summer camp. I hope that people will visit our website, Instagram, Facebook, and check us out!