Eve Ensler

I had the privilege of seeing Eve Ensler kick off her latest book tour for In The Body of the World on Friday, April 26 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her absolute honesty about her own suffering through abuse and cancer  and the experiences of the women of the Congo roared through the historic Lensic Theater in such a way that no one could leave there untouched, asleep, still pretending that there is not horrific violence against women and girls in the world. I was inspired to fight harder, more honestly, more radically for the rights of women through the work of The Girl’s Guide to Swagger.

Ensler was sexually abused and beaten as a child.  As a result, she learned to emotionally leave her body so that she wouldn’t feel the pain. While she was writing The Vagina Monologues, she heard stories from women about their sexual experiences. “I wish I could say that the stories that I heard were about pleasure and satisfaction and desire and orgasm, but 99 percent of those stories were about women being abused, incested, raped, being forced to leave their vaginas disconnected, never knowing their vaginas,” said Ensler.  “That was the beginning of whole consciousness radicalization for me…I had no idea of the epidemic proportions of violence on this planet. It is like a hidden story.”

Ensler also said that women are fractured and cut off from ourselves by the trauma that they have experienced; that we are asleep. But rather than staying in this “semi-sleep,” Ensler woke up and came out fighting. She broke the taboo regarding talking about vaginas with her play The Vagina Monologues.

After she had been performing the play for awhile by herself, Ensler became restless. She wanted to do something more.

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If you are looking for some inspiration and a bit of advice on how to kick start your business and sharpen your message, you may want to talk to Lucinda Cross. She left her corporate job, which was working behind the scenes to make other people look good, in order to step out in front and start her own business.

In addition to advising entrepreneurs and speaking on panels, Lucinda has written two books. Corporate Mom Drop Outs contains the stories of women who left corporate jobs and made their own success working from home. Her second book The Road to Redemption: Overcoming Life’s Detours, Obstacles, and Challenges, advises us on how to grow and embrace the opportunities that life brings to us. It was published in 2012 and has been an Amazon best seller ever since.

What Lucinda loves to do is work with women to help hone their message. She helps them set a vision and be clear on it, along with identifying ways to make money with their business. She says “It is important to have a vision. Women can use their words as powerful vessels to heal. They can use the power of the tongue and pen to make a difference.” Read more…

“In fully accepting your creative power, you honor and respect your soul and remind others to do the same.” ~Sonia Choquette

Creative drive, empowerment and advocacy is clearly emanated through the souls of many women. But in recent years, we’ve seen a decline in these attributes among today’s youth and The Girl’s Guide to Swagger is on a mission to make sure we don’t continue down this path. When those strengths are not drawn upon, women as a whole lose out. Fortunately, we all can nurture each other so that this doesn’t happen.  Ashley Marinaccio shows us how we can as she works to cultivate these important attributes through the girls and women involved in Girl Be Heard, a theater collective that uses acting to empower young women ages 12 through 21 to become brave, confident, socially conscious leaders while exploring their own lives.

Performers from Girl Be Heard

Girl Be Heard was founded four years ago by Marinaccio, who is the now Artistic Director. She is an activist and artist and her work has been seen in many venues across the country such as global TED conferences, The White House, United Nations, and on tour across the United States. She holds a M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Bachelor’s of the Arts in theatre directing and sociology/anthropology with minors in women/gender and Middle Eastern from Pace University.Marinaccio’s enjoys utilizing theatre for peace building, healing, and empowerment and her vast background led her to be the most suitable person to begin this organization back at the Estrogenius Theatre Festival  in 2008, where she was asked to write a play for teenage girls performing at the festival. But instead, she changed things up a bit by having the girls write and act out the plays themselves.“It was apparent that I should not be writing this for them (the plays girls were performing). They needed to be empowered to write it themselves. So we had each of the girls get into discussions.

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Sheena Williams, President, SheWill, Inc.

When you are financially empowered, you are more able to control many aspects of your life. It’s an essential building block that many people unfortunately don’t seem to receive in their upbringing. This is reflected in the current state of America’s economy, as well as within the rest of the world.

Fortunately, there are brilliant people like Sheena Williams in the world who are working to change things. She is the founder of SheWill, Inc., an organization geared toward improving financial literacy in girls ages eight to 17 and families.

“I teach how to be responsible with money management. I also teach career empowerment and entrepreneurship,” said Williams.  “Basically what I do is try to prepare girls for life skills before they graduate high school and go off to college, so they’ll have fundamental financial and career skills before leaving their parents house.”

When Williams graduated from high school, all her dad ever told her was to be responsible with money. And as an 18- year- old living on her own, she didn’t know what that meant. “I made mistakes and I just don’t want the future generation to have to go through those obstacles that I did,” Williams said.

Williams has since earned an MBA in Public Administration and is the President of SheWill, Inc. During one of the company’s seminars or events, girls learn about savings, budgeting, and philanthropy. They are taught the difference between a credit card, debit card and checking account. Classes also learn what credit is, how to establish credit and different forms of credit such as store credit. They are able to review a credit card statement and learn about interest rates.

“We do simple interest for them and a little bit of compounding interest for savings but mostly interest rates for credit cards,” said Williams.

Sheena hosts classes and seminars throughout her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia and recently has been able to start working with school districts and organizations across the country. Read more…

Gretchen Cawthon

Throughout history and even today, women are told by men what they can and can’t do. Fortunately, the human spirit allows us the free will to decide for ourselves what we can do. We just have to tap into our inner confidence.

In 2005, when Gretchen Cawthon was told by a man that “women just don’t do web design,” something snapped inside her and she set out to prove him wrong.

“I was actually co-owner of a drum company … it was kind of a start up and we began working on a marketing plan and I was pretty much the fulltime marketing director. When it came down to the website, our business partner told my husband,  ‘I’ll handle the website, women just don’t do web design,’” said Gretchen.

She left the drum business shortly after that. Because she already had a great deal of experience teaching computers on a professional level, she decided to begin researching web design and learning how to build one herself.

“I was brought up with a computer in the house my entire life. So I just picked it up on my own. I knew a lot about computer programs and applications and so I taught people,” said Gretchen. “I went to the library and checked out every possible book I could on web design. In about 2 weeks, I put together the website the way I wanted it,” she said.

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Brenda Summerville

There are as many paths in faith as there are in life. Sometimes those paths are opposite, sometimes they’re parallel and sometimes those paths can cross and even interconnect. For Brenda Summerville, the interconnection between these two paths is all too familiar as she works her way from the corporate world into a world of ministry. The Chicago-based career woman will graduate with a Master in Divinity from the Chicago Theological Seminary this coming May and has quite a list of plans to help empower women and her community.

After spending about 20 years in corporate America, Summerville decided she needed to make a change for the better in her life. “I’m just coming into my own space, being my voice,” said Summerville. “I want to give back and help women.”

As she dives into her new path with both arms, Summerville is making plans to publish a couple of books and potentially either work in parish ministry or help other churches.

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Shantay Carter

Integrity. A word defined as “soundness of moral character; honesty or the state of being whole, or undiminished.” Integrity is strong value for the Girls Guide to Swagger  and we look for the opportunity to recognize organizations who support this value.  Today we are featuring Shantay Carter and her organization, Women Of Integrity, Inc.

Shantay is on a mission to support and empower women in her community to foster the confidence they need to accomplish their future goals. The organization carries out their mission by offering volunteer services, professional mentoring programs and also participating in community outreach events throughout Hempstead, New York in Long Island and other near-by communities.

Carter is a woman of strong identity and by nature, she has always liked to help people. Over the years, she transferred those skills into a successful career as a nurse and is now refining those skills even further, along with nearly 30 other volunteers working with Women of Integrity. Her motivation for starting the organization began when she noticed that many women, especially young women and girls in her community didn’t seem to possess self-confidence needed to live well-developed lives. Read more…

Guest blog by Carol Terry of Say What You Mean, writing, coaching, and information design. Carol discusses the real nature of what we do at work and how to describe it. Need some encouragement to describe your work in more detail, with more confidence? Read Carol’s thoughts on the spiritual aspects of résumés.

Do you know what you really do at work? Some of us find it difficult to showcase our professional accomplishments, possibly because we don’t realize what we  actually do. We go to work every day; try to do our best. Often, we actually do our best. But to break down everything that you actually do might take a little coaxing. Okay, say you “Defuse potential conflicts with humor.” Or “Manage projects with diverse stakeholders.” Read more…

Carrie Williar

When you love the community you live in, you want to make it better.  And when you love what you do, there’s no telling what you’re capable of and what wonderful things you can create from that love. It makes you strong. It makes you brave and it even can help you find things that help others by accident. It challenges you and frustrates you, but you still love almost every minute of it.

Carrie Williar knows something about that kind of love for her community. And her swagger as a TEDxABQ organizer thus far, is taking her to new heights in the world of communication. Coming from a back ground in art therapy, Williar has been involved with social media and creative marketing for several years. “I just genuinely enjoy social media. Sure it’s about reaching people with your message,” Said Williar, “but I think it’s also simply about relationships and communication expressing an interest in the other people around you.”  She began to volunteer for TEDxABQ in 2010 and now has been recently selected to curate a TEDxABQWomen event. Read more…

If there could be any doubt that Julie Loar was a woman of swagger, it would be erased with one look at Julie holding not one – but two – cobras on our recent trip to Egypt! If you’ve read some of the previous pieces about my recent trip to Egypt, you know that Julie organized the trip – it was her 11th visit to Egypt. While visiting the temple of Kom Ombo on our Nile Cruise – Julie felt drawn to the cobras being shown by a man on the sidewalk. Our group went over with her. Even though I don’t really mind snakes, I have to admit that I was not anxious to have one or two on me. But Julie was! She later described the experience, saying she felt at ease with the snakes and the snakes felt at ease with her. But when a man approached too quickly, she felt the snakes get nervous.  She was surprised how intelligent and sensitive they seemed.

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