Young Women's Leadership Program turns 15

Hundreds of middle school girls, their parents and college-aged mentors gathered Saturday afternoon to celebrate the end of a successful semester and the 15th anniversary of the Young Women’s Leadership Program.

The program pairs seventh and eighth grade girls from area middle schools with University of Virginia students who act as “big sisters.”

Program director Edith “Winx” Lawrence, also a professor of clinical and school psychology, said that the program, a partnership between UVa’s Curry School of Education and Women’s Center, has served over 1,000 girls and 1,000 college-aged women since its start in 1997.

 “We designed it to boost the leadership skills and self-esteem of both middle school girls and the college women who participate in it. I think they can be great teachers to each other,” Lawrence said. Big and little sisters meet both individually and in small groups once each week.

This year’s Fall Finale presentation began with a dance performance by the UVa African Music and Dance Ensemble. The group performed a traditional social dance that originated in Ghana, and invited audience members to join in.

YWLP made the effort to incorporate African culture into the program to recognize the program’s sister site in Cameroon, which opened in 2009.

This year, girls from the Cameroon program wrote and recorded themselves singing a song about the program. YWLP members and the audience came together to learn the chorus of the song, and join the Cameroonian girls in singing as a sign of their solidarity.

“I feel like the program has been really successful [in Cameroon],” Caroline Berinyuy, a Curry School doctoral student and founder of the sister site, said. “It just exploded.”

The program was so successful that Berinyuy organized a group of college women to visit Cameroon over the summer and train more mentors for the overwhelming number of “little sisters.”

Next, YWLP sisters gave short presentations on reflecting on their experience in the program.

Eighth-grade students created “herstory” projects, creating short videos to tell a part of their own life story. Two girls got to share their films with the audience.

Later, the small groups of seventh-grade girls and their mentors performed skits that they designed to show off their sisterhood bonds and leadership skills. One group of little sisters performed their own take on “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” by asking their big sisters questions about leadership strategies. Other groups performed their own song and dance numbers based on popular music like Nikki Minaj’s “Superbass” and the soundtrack from the film “Grease.”

“It’s like a family,” Kaila Rayland, a seventh-grade student at Jack Jouett Middle School, said. “It’s nice to always have someone by your side to talk.”

Brooke Weedon, a third-year student at UVa, said she has enjoyed her time volunteering as a mentor with YWLP.

“It’s been a really great experience,” she said, noting that she enjoys getting to know both the little sisters and the other mentors.

Janet Alving said her daughter Athena, also a seventh-grader at Jack Jouett Middle School, enjoys her time with her big sister.

“Her big sister is a good influence. She takes [Athena] onto the college campus and shows her what her life is like,” Alving said. Now, she said Athena is starting to talk about going to college, something she had not expressed interest in before joining YWLP.

Before the conclusion of the afternoon’s ceremony, Sharon Davie, director of the Women’s Center, and Jennifer Merritt, associate director of YWLP, recognized Lawrence for her 15 years of hard work and commitment to the project.

“There is one woman leader who has taken my heart and helped my mind to fly, and that’s Winx Lawrence,” Davie said.