Thinking Outside the Girl Box: Teaming Up with Resilient Youth in Appalachia

2. Shelley: The Birth of the GRP. It’s a Girl (-Driven Program)!

 2 The Birth of the GRP: It’s a Girl (-Driven Program)! LiTTLe TinY Boxes “no, i’m not going to buy you that class ring—because you’re not going to graduate high school, anyhow.” As a teenager, shelley Gaines’s best friend Jamie (name changed) faced many family expectations, but not the kind that make you want to work hard, study, and go to college. “There was nobody who said, you know,‘you’re cool,’ or ‘you’re smart’ [or] . . . anything other than ‘you’re going to get pregnant and . . . you’re not going to graduate high school,’” shelley recalled. Jamie’s two sisters had had babies as teenagers. no one in her family had gone to college before.And although Jamie was in the “college track” with shelley and taking all honors classes, no one in her family believed that she could be the first to go to college. As it turns out, she wasn’t. It’s a Girl (-Driven Program)! 33 “she had all these labels that she carried around,”said shelley.“she ended up dropping out of high school in her senior year and . . . went to another state with a guy.” shelley added that at that point, Jamie completely dropped off the radar.she hasn’t been able to track her down since. petite in size but not in presence, shelley was and is a real force to be reckoned with. in the years i worked with her, shelley wore her fine brown hair in a youthful pixie cut and was quick to break into a broad smile.With her down-to-earth,“get it done” personality, you rarely had to wonder what shelley had in mind. Growing up in both north carolina and Westvirginia as the daughter of a social worker mother, shelley knew early on that she wanted to work with struggling kids. she points to her relationship with Jamie as the experience that led her “from generally wanting to work with kids to more specifically wanting to work with girls in a supportive, affirming way.” in Lincoln county, shelley saw once again the story of low expectations shaping outcomes.“When i [started working] with the kids here i had that same feeling,” she remembered.“The kids that we were working with were really carrying around a lot of labels that people gave them and that it just got perpetuated within the family, or from the community. . . . everybody has had these girls in these little tiny boxes that were very disempowering . . . and predicted all of these terrible things for their futures.” Thinking of the potential she had seen in Jamie,shelley had different ideas about the girls’ futures. Working as an intern for high school resiliency programs established through Westvirginia’s safe and drug free communities program in the early 1990s, shelley met some of the county’s movers and shakers, including our chapter 1 hero, ric Macdowell. ric remembers:“[it was then] that i met shelley.one of the things we found out when we did the analysis of the data from the resiliency programs we had going on in the county’s four high schools was that girls who were in the program had a much bigger increase in self-esteem [than boys]....We made a decision to have just a girls’group....[shelley] thought,‘i really like this,and i’d like to stay in Lincoln county and continue doing this work.’” so in 1996,with eight girls in one junior high school—and no support staff—shelley became the first director of the Girls’ resiliency program (Grp). over the next few years, she brought in grant money and hired 34 shelley:The Birth of the Grp staff; the program grew quickly to include more than sixty girls in three schools.The Grp was selected as one of twelve youth development organizations in the United states to be supported by the Ms. foundation’s collaborative fund for Youth-Led social change program, and shelley received the prestigious Gloria steinem Women of vision Award. Kind of LiKe MendinG Bones one of the reasons i was drawn to this project was shelley’s vision of youth capability and her deep-seated optimism about what was possible . in a piece written for a presentation at Marshall University, shelley reflected on the beginnings of the Grp and on the importance of the concept of resiliency in the philosophy behind the work...