GLOW

Let’s be honest, girls don’t always get their fair share. In many countries throughout the world, girls are routinely pushed into housework, caring for younger siblings, and doing other daily chores that keep them from fully taking advantage of the education available to them. More often than not, girls fall behind in education and get left behind due to family obligations and teen pregnancy. Girls are often seen as a bad investment because they will be married into other families, whereas boys can labor, earn money, and bring in a wife and children to support parents as they age. It’s not exactly fair, but it’s what happens.

However, it doesn’t always have to happen. Teach a girl to dream, and she’ll conquer the world (I’m getting there). It just takes a little extra, focused effort to show girls what they are capable of. Not everyone is lucky enough to be instilled with the belief that they are capable of anything, and even if they are, how many girls around the world have access to the education, resources, and all kinds of support systems that will carry them through their adolescence into a successful future? Dreaming big requires a strong foundation, and it takes a lot of work just to get started.

So we are having a GLOW conference. Girls Leading Our World. In an attempt to start the foundation that will lead to big changes and monumental dreams, a group of us PCVs in Samoa are putting on a conference for girls. We want to emphasize the importance of education in leading to a wider variety of careers. Not a passive education, either. We want these girls to pay attention, do, and strive. We will have presentations on leadership that teach girls how to set goals and achieve them, while also avoiding those things that make life significantly harder. We want to show these girls how to lead a healthy, balanced life that will allow them to try more, do more, and be more. It’s a big dream, but we’ve gotta start somewhere.

Best of all, you can help. Instead of talking about that person you know on a tiny little dot in the ocean, you can impact the lives of so many girls on that tiny little dot in the ocean so maybe their world will be a little bigger. Please help us by donating to our project. Big ideas usually require big funding, but fortunately the exchange rate works in our favor. Together we make the world better.

You can donate by following this link:
https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.donatenow&keyword=Corey

Or by going here:
www.peacecorps.gov/donate
and searching for project number 491-028

It’s kind of a funky-lookin page because it comes in a standard Peace Corps set-up that we don’t get to customize for our project. Just scroll down a bit and make sure it says something about “Karen Corey” (or just Karen or just Corey) and GLOW and you’ve got the right place. We are raising funds to pay for the cost of a renting a conference room for one day, breakfast and lunch for all participants, honorariums for presenters, and certificates and small gifts for the girls attending.