Women are 51% of humankind, empowering them will change everything… I can promise you that women working together linked, informed, and educated can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken panet.

- Isabel Allende, author, at TED

If you have a young one in your family or extended family, send them to Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School, which I heard about from his TED talk on “5 Dangerous Things you should let your kids do”: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202

(Hint! Let them play with fire, own a pocket knife, and learn how to drive!)

From his website: www.tinkeringschool.com, he and his wife and associates offer a unique camp which offers kids ages 7-17 the opportunity to learn how to build things out of their own ideas.

“By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

“Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized.”

Each child receives adult supervision and encouragement. They learn how to use power tools, they play with gravity, with fire, with mechanical appliances, and they have organic fresh food and a sleeapaway camp experience on the Tinkering School site. Parents may drop them off and pick them up a week later (they’re probably dirty and happy!) and all students receive a cordless drill and a box of supplies as a going-away gift.

Sejal Hathi and her team at Girls Helping Girls just launched their website, and these girls are a real inspiration. “‘I feel blessed to be able to give back to the community- my life would never be fulfilled without such service,” says Hathi, who was only 15 years old when she started the program.

http://www.empoweragirl.org

This international nonprofit organization, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, partners girls in the United States with girls in schools and community organizations in developing countries to jointly identify problems in their communities and develop social change through micro lending projects to address those issues.

There are four main areas in which Girls Helping Girls is focusing its efforts: 1) Eradicate Poverty, 2) Increase Access to Education, 3) Improve Health, and 4) Promote Peace.

Hathi and the other founders Sandal Khandoker, Hanna Kim, and Angelica Teng are all in high school, but they’re using their energy and belief in a better world to drive the organization forward.

Girls Helping Girls teaches girls to value their identities and find strength in one other. GHG not only empowers girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to stand tall and assert their voice, but it also educates them to value cultural diversity. The programs currently are in place in India, Ghana and Turkey, with more sites on the way.

With this kind of enthusiasm and passion for helping others, I’m excited to support Girls Helping Girls and I hope you’ll join me in helping spread the word about this remarkable project.