Get acquainted with our winners from last year's Girls Rock! awards.

Remember last year's awesome gals? Here's your chance to nominate a girl for the 2010 awards! Click the title of this post and you'll be directed to the nomination form, or follow this link for an online nomination option.

Title IX Champion: Waterville-Oakland Girls' High School Hockey Team
When told that the only way for them to play hockey would be to join the boys' team, fifteen girls from Waterville and Oakland chose another path. They raised enough funds for their own team and have gone on to win numerous tournaments around the state!

Health Advocacy: Chelsea Schoen
Chelsea has been an active member of the Maine Youth Action Network (MYAN) for over two years, and has brought the Thin Line (a production about eating disorders) and an anti-tobacco program to her school. Two years ago, Chelsea also testified at the State House to get increased funding
for School-Based Health Centers across Maine, eventually helping to secure $500,000 in additional funding for the next two years.

Against the Odds: Vera Mauro
Vera entered Noble Middle School in 2008, as a new student to public schools. Though She is deaf, Vera doesn’t let it get in her way. She is a high academic achiever, and as an extracurricular activity, Vera initiated a sign language class to be held after school for both her peers and teachers. She continues to take time out of her busy day to teach sign language to whoever wants to learn.


Community Organizing: Leila Saad
Leila’s belief in a united community led her to co-found a Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) group at Sumner High School in 2006. She has since arranged for the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to address the high school staff of her school on issues of sexuality, and continues to educate and advocate for others.

Entrepreneurship: Samantha Lee Todd
Samantha started her own organic business named “Simply Luscious," where she produces hand slave and lip balm by growing her own ingredients at home or purchasing them from local health food stores. Samantha donates her proceeds to needy children in Uganda and Guatemala.

Co-Creator: Aleah Starr
Aleah, a junior at Colby College, started a project entitled, “Projections” to raise awareness on eating disorders among young adults. The project calls attention to the negative and limiting image society imposes on young people, and has already been shown at the Maine Legislative Briefing and many other venues across the state.

Speak out against sexualized and violent games aimed at kids!

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is heading up a petition against the sexualized and violent video games promoted by Nickelodeon. Take action by signing the open letter to Nickelodeon reps (excerpt below).

Share this link with friends and colleagues through Twitter, email, etc

Thank you for your support and continued activism!"Did you know that Nickelodeon, the children’s media empire, is promoting sexualized and violent video games to children as young as preschoolers? Its popular gaming website, Addictinggames.com, features games such as Candy the Naughty Cheerleader, Bloody Day (“Back alley butchering has never been so much fun. . . . How many kills can you rack?”) and the Perry the Sneak series, where gamers take the role of a peeping Tom trying to catch revealing glimpses of scantily clad and naked women. Nickelodeon promotes, and links directly to, Addictinggames.com on its Nick.com website for children and even on its Nick Jr.com, its website for preschoolers.

Please visit the petition to tell Nickelodeon to stop promoting sexualized and violent video games to children.

Check out Lyn Mikel Brown's piece featured in the PTA online magazine!

Hardy Girls is overjoyed to share another insightful article by Lyn Mikel Brown, who challenges and critiques the media's influence on children and youth. This piece, "Taming the Media Stereotypes that Make Kids Aggressive," is featured in the December 2009/January 2010 edition of the PTA online magazine.

Point, Shoot, Retouch and Label?

The New York Times online last week featured a piece about French Parliament member and mother of two teenage girls, Valerie Boyer, who has introduced a draft law that would mandate that retouched photographs appearing in advertisements feature a label that clearly discloses their digital alterations.

Unsurprisingly, Boyer faces opposition—from people that claim that Michelangelo’s paintings prove that this idealization of women is age-old; from people that argue anorexia is far too complex a disorder to pin the blame on a few photographs; and from people that claim that women and girls must already know that the photographs have been retouched because they’re so unrealistic.

Boyer defends her case, echoing some long-held Hardy Girls sentiments along the way: “If someone wants to make life a success, wants to feel good in their skin, wants to be part of society, one has to be thin or skinny, and then it’s not enough — one will have [her] body transformed with software that alters the image, so we enter a standardized and brainwashed world, and those who aren’t part of it are excluded from society.”

This exclusion is precisely where we, as a society, and our girls and women run into trouble. The constant media barrage instills in girls and women the belief that they will never be good enough, but eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are only a couple of a whole host of issues research has proven to result from feeling as if one will never be thin/pretty/sexually appealing enough to measure up. These include, but are not limited to, depression, self-mutilation, alcoholism, and drug use. We don’t mean to make light of eating disorders and certainly hold media culpable, but we also embrace that it’s far too simplistic to claim that people develop eating disorders because they read magazines.

Now, having acknowledged the complex web that impossible societal expectations weave — we’re all for labeling retouched photos. It’s an appropriate first step toward calling out unrealistic standards of beauty in a consistent way.

What do you think?

What we are thankful for...

Read our latest Enews!

Help Us Save New Moon!

A message from HGHW co-founder, Lyn Mikel Brown:

When my daughter was 8, I bought her a subscription to New Moon Magazine. As a feminist mom I loved that she would never see a diet ad or receive instruction about how to steal that cute guy in the pages of this magazine. New Moon promised and delivered something "for every girl who wants her voice heard and her dreams taken seriously." They supported my personal mission "to build healthy resistance to gender inequalities." With departments like Girls on The Go, Herstory, and Girls Act Out, my daughter connected with girls across the country and the world who understood they had something to say worth listening to. While other magazines went for outer beauty, New Moon defined beauty as "good hearts, great works, and activism."

I can't imagine a world for girls without New Moon Magazine. But without our support, New Moon will no longer rise.

Hardy Girls Healthy Women has joined New Moon Girl Media as an Affiliate Partner. For every subscription bought via this link* $10 will come back to support Hardy Girls' local programming. In perfect synch with our Hardy Girls message to girls, we all win when we work in coalition with one another!

*Please note that the link brings you directly to our affiliation page, as indicated at the end of the URL "HDGRLH." Though the Hardy Girls name and logo are not represented on the webpage itself (we are working to fix this) please trust that by following the above link with its special URL ending, you will be ordering a subscription through our affiliation.

Today I called our local elementary school, to find that the 4th and 5th grade library did not subscribe to New Moon. To keep the dream alive, I'm buying a year's subscription for the Albert S. Hall School in Waterville, Maine. Please join me: Buy a membership to New Moon for an 8-14 year old girl in your life. If she's all grown up like my daughter, buy a subscription for a local school, library, doctor's office, or homeless shelter. Then join "Save New Moon" where you can help just by spreading the word.

We have until December 12, 2009. Let's all pitch in and save New Moon for the next generation of smart, strong, hardy girls!

HGHW responds to the Maine election results and their impact on youth.

As you know, November 3rd was a big day here in Maine. With a slim majority, Mainers voted to repeal the law that granted the right to same-sex couples to marry. One of our first thoughts here at Hardy Girls was how this news, and Campaign messages on both sides, have impacted Maine youth and their sense of community and safety. I think we can all agree that the security, support, and wellbeing of our youth are core concerns. For that reason, we are including a few resources to support your new, ongoing, and renewed work to protect and support all youth.

As we learned from the Ugly Ducklings National Campaign to Reduce Bullying and Harassment of LGBTQ Youth, the importance of safe, supportive communities for all youth cannot be understated. According to the 2007 GLSEN National School Climate Survey:

-86.2% of LGBT students reported being verbally harassed, 44.1% reported being physically harassed and 22.1% reported being physically assaulted at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation.

-73.6% heard derogatory remarks such as "faggot" or "dyke" frequently or often at school.

-More than half (60.8%) of students reported that they felt unsafe in school because of their sexual orientation, and more than a third (38.4%) felt unsafe because of their gender expression.

- 31.7% of LGBT students missed a class and 32.7% missed a day of school in the past month because of feeling unsafe, compared to only 5.5% and 4.5%, respectively, of a national sample of secondary school students.

The statistics are staggering but they highlight the need for all of us to continue to fight for environments where all youth can thrive: in families, schools, and communities free of bias-based harassment and violence.

Whether or not the state recognizes same-sex marriages does not diminish the impact that this election has on Maine families, and in particular, children. We encourage you to please reach out to the young people in your life and encourage conversation about how we can all work to create an ideal environment where all youth can grow up free of harassment. Now, more than ever, it's important for young people to know where they can turn to for support, information, and allies.

For all our friends and allies, we recommend the following resources for reducing bullying, harassment, and violence.

Top Ten Ways to Make Schools Safer...For All Students

Lesson Plan: Building a Bully-Free Building

Four Steps Schools Can Take to Address Anti-LGBT Bullying and Harassment