Empowering Young Women Through the Girls Grace Event

By Eden Newman, MHS Senior

When first enrolling at Milton Hershey School, you are told to find an activity, a club, or a way to get you involved in the community you’ll now be living in. Originally, I took that statement and ran with it. I joined everything I could to feel a sense of connection. No matter what activities I joined, it never quite compared to the community I felt when attending the annual Girls Grace event.

For the past 3 years, I’ve attended each Girls Grace event. Built on uplifting, unifying, and connecting current students with alumni, the feeling that comes with Girls Grace can be described as nothing other than electric. The annual six-hour celebration of empowerment and growth allows each young woman to sit in on sessions ranging from money management and self-confidence to hair care, skin care, and succeeding in life. Each student was able to pick two sessions to go to, giving each of us the chance to pour into ourselves in the areas that mattered most to us personally. We also had the opportunity to give back. We wrote heartfelt letters to the staff at Penn State Health, honoring and thanking them for their service to the community.

I’ve always enjoyed the event, but there was something about this year, the 10th anniversary of the event, and my last year attending, that made it special for me. Coming together with over 100 of my peers, focusing on the theme of “you are a pearl,” reminded us that we are something to cherish and value. It’s not the gifts, the music, or the food that we receive at Girls Grace that bring those happy feelings. It’s the warmth of entering the sessions, catered to give students exactly what they need at the time of receiving them, surrounded by other like-minded people who do it.

I have the honor of being the mentee of the woman who started the program, Sharice Johnson, MHS Coordinator of Staff and Student Engagement. Watching her carefully craft and create every detail that goes into this event is an inspiration in itself. I knew all the years of being her mentee and experiencing that sisterhood had paid off when my co-speaker Gianni Vargas and I couldn’t stop the tears from falling out of our eyes, remembering the years we spent giving to this program, and watching the students around us feel the same joy we had when we were in their shoes years ago.

The Girls Grace program is an exciting time for students to come together and recognize the beauty within themselves and in the world around them. The program, which started with Sharice Johnson, has now expanded to 11 staff members who, together, have created a 10-year legacy of confident, strong, and compassionate young women, and that is incredibly powerful.