Jess Thompson
Aisha Musa
Aisha Musa and Jess Thompson from GirlStart spoke to us on September 7th. GirlStart is committed to giving girls the power of STEM. They do this through after school programs for 4th and 5th girls, summer camps and community programs. They are in 38 schools in Central Texas alone and have 2000 girls each semester in their program at no cost to the girls. They provide a hands on curriculum to make STEM fun and interesting. For their summer camps, GirlStart has guest speakers who are women who work in STEM fields. The summer camps are for 4th - 8th graders and are one week long for each camper. This summer, they reached 800 girls, and 98 percent participated for free. Their community STEM programs provide outreach events for all ages to promote STEM education; these include activities for the entire family. One example is their starry nights program each month, which is astronomy-based. They also set up STEM nights at schools and have community one-day events. All of their programs use volunteers to help with logistics and programming. At the end of the meeting, Aisha and Jess asked us to do inspirational notes for the girls. They also provided volunteer newsletter sign up for those who are interested. GirlStart was founded in 1997 and gets its funding from donors and grants. For more info go to: girlstart.org.