What the Empowerment Academy Meant to Me

Guest Blog Post by Eve, Empowerment Academy Graduate

I am a leader. I’m a campaign lead, I’m a founder of chapters, I’ve been in international leadership communities. More importantly, I’m a big sister, and I want to make sure my baby sibling has someone to look up to and lean on. I want to be a role model one day.

Those were the first few sentences of my application to Project Glimmer’s Empowerment Academy, conducted in partnership with Babson College. I knew before all of that could happen, I had to dismantle the imposter syndrome and lack of resources that have been instilled in me by default because I am a girl, I am young, and I live in a heavily gerrymandered state. My name is Eve (she/her), I am 16 years old, and I’ve been involved in grassroots activism since I was in 8th grade. It was my young age that proved to me more than anything I could read, that empowerment and power are intrinsically linked. Many women and girls are given the opportunity to wield changemaking power, and it is unnoticed or unused because we, especially girls and women of color, are taught that we should not step up and use it.

“Not only do I want to have the resources, skills and facilities to lead,” I wrote, “I want to feel confident to do so…A good leader is someone who ensures not only she is prepared, but her team is prepared as well.” When I lead, I wanted my team members to be confident along with me. I wanted to guarantee that I’m an effective, informed leader and the people I lead are supported–and I knew that Project Glimmer’s Empowerment Academy would strengthen and build upon the foundations that I’ve already gained from my experience as a leader.

I could never have imagined how right I could be. Over six weeks, I workshopped a presentation using tools that I was taught during that time. I bonded and worked closely with a group of 19 other passionate and smart young women in high school. I heard from inspiring and insightful guest teachers who led exercises to strengthen a plethora of skills that help me in anything from interviews to homework, and applications to press conferences. I was mentored by undergraduate students and the director of Babson College’s Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership. I emerged in awe of Project Glimmer. It is a huge and incredible organization, which I know not simply from the statistics and the impact, but from my personal experience that I’m honored to have had.

The final project was a presentation about achieving a goal, which sounds easy enough–but true to nature, Project Glimmer took it a step further. The first order of business was finding a realistic goal that still pushed our comfort zone and created a potential for accomplishment. This was a delicate balance of exploring feasible opportunities that were still areas for deep growth. For some, that was public speaking.

For me, my first proposal was creating an app to report street harassment. That issue was my introduction to more organized activism, through founding my state’s then-only active chapter of Chalk Back, a global nonprofit fighting gender-based street harassment through writing stories of harassment in chalk on the streets where they happened. Ashley Lucas, one of the leads in the Empowerment Academy–a woman whose patience and support I could only wish to one day emulate–suggested a more in-depth, realistic timeline. The key word here was realistic, because it was that same month that I had first learned how to even begin to code and create an app through a scholarship to Kode With Klossy, a two-week coding summer program.

My goal evolved. I had wanted to create a more effective way for people to submit their stories of harassment, including to me as the lead of Catcalls of Salt Lake City, my Chalk Back chapter. However, in reality, I hadn’t gone into the streets to chalk yet. In March of 2021, a woman who read the catcall that I was chalking, verbally assaulted and threw water at me. I was 15 years old at the time, and due to the conservative nature of my state, was working alone at Catcalls of SLC. I had been too anxious to go back on the streets since.

Project Glimmer changed that. More specifically, the community and the tools that Project Glimmer had developed to provide and serve its young women, changed that. During my final presentation, I showed the video that I managed to record while the woman was screaming at me. I spoke about my strengths, values, investment, connections, and recent steps that I had taken over the past six weeks to accomplish my goal of going out and chalking in public spaces again. I ended my presentation by sharing studies about gender-based street harassment, and asked about personal experiences of my fellow women and young women in the Empowerment Academy.

And then, like this overwhelmingly supportive group had done for the presentations of every other participant who grew and spread her wings with this program, I got a round of applause.