Rebecca Crist is fired up. It’s a sweltering summer day, a perfect day to grill at a local park–and a perfect chance to show the handful of girls surrounding her how it’s done. The girls watch intently as the 28-year-old book editor deftly handles charcoal, crumpled paper and matches. Soon, the girls will plunk tofu burgers and turkey hot dogs onto the grill. Then they’ll load their plates with potato chips, squirt ketchup on buns and chow down. And they’ll taste victory.
Crist and this hungry gathering of girls are part of GirlZone, a non-profit, volunteer-run group in Champaign that gives girls the chance to learn skills and have adventures that defy gender boundaries. But the group doesn’t just open doors for girls–the women who run GirlZone get to fling wide the doors that slammed in their faces when they were girls.
“Working with GirlZone has wonderful benefits for the girls, but also for me and the other volunteers,” says GirlZone founder Aimee Rickman, 29. “It’s a way to take the frustration out of being told when you were young, ‘Girls don’t play drums.’ Or maybe you had a math teacher who didn’t encourage you. To take that and make the situation better for girls, that helps us turn our frustration or anger or hopelessness into joy.”
Crist agrees. “I was never allowed to play with fire as a kid. My brother was, and now he’s a Forest Service firefighter. What a cool job! He has all these skills I never learned.”
Rickman never wants to hear a girl say “I never learned.” But five years ago, she looked around her community and didn’t like what it had to offer girls. So Rickman, who earned her master’s degree in educational psychology from the University of Illinois, started GirlZone, “to really give girls an opportunity to try things they might not be encouraged to do, not because of spite or malice, but because people may not think of, say, inviting a girl under the hood of the car to see what’s going on when Dad’s tinkering around.”
GirlZone got rolling, Rickman insists, only because she found other like-minded women in the community who were eager to help girls. So they opened an office at the local YMCA and began offering female-led workshops. The goal was not only to teach girls skills that otherwise might be off-limits, but also to provide interesting, skilled women as role models.
The monthly workshops, which are open to girls age 7 to 18 on a sliding-scale fee of $1 to $8, have produced a bountiful offering. Girls have learned to play rock instruments, fix cars and bikes, create an Internet ‘zine, design a Web site, use power tools, invest money, build a CD rack, make films and box. They’ve also cooked and made hats. (“We don’t want to send the message that `women’s stuff’ is bad,” Rickman says. “Things girls do rock as hard as everything else.”)
Plus, GirlZone girls produce RadioGirl, a show that airs alternate Sundays at 10 a.m. on the community radio station WEFT-FM 90.1.
A metamorphosis
The workshops’ effect on girls, Rickman says, is truly amazing.
“There’s a definite difference in the room that you feel between the time a girl comes and leaves. At first, you can see the awkwardness, like in the drumming classes. But we teach them a few basics, and they don’t get teased, we just let them go to town. It’s so hard to get them to go home after that!”
Sehvilla Mann, 15, stops for a moment at GirlZone’s barbecue to talk of her experience with the group. Her eyes shine; she’s a big fan. Mann has been involved with GirlZone since 5th grade, has taken Web design and skateboarding workshops and is a deejay for RadioGirl.
“At first in the workshops, I was pretty resistant and nervous,” she says. “Then, I’d get interested and involved in what I was doing and forget I was nervous. By the end, I’d be really happy and willing to try something else.”
Anni Poppen, 24, who helps run workshops, says she has seen girls break free from embarrassment to joy again and again. “At a skateboarding workshop, one of the girls was scared to stand on the skateboard. I got her to stand, and I’d hold her hands. Then finally I got her to push off. By the end of the workshop, I couldn’t find her–she was out skateboarding all over the place.”
Rickman says, “Kids don’t want to do a lot of stuff, but it’s up to adults to say, `C’mon, try it!’ We especially need to challenge girls and not let them sit on the sidelines.”
Volunteer Michelle Alvaradohas brought her two daughters to the barbecue. The 5-year-old smiles shyly from behind floppy brown bangs; the 2-year-old grins up from her stroller. Alvarado, who has led Web-design workshops for GirlZone, wants more choices for her daughters than she had as a girl. “I could have used some info on how to fix cars,” she says, “and I wouldn’t have minded having someone teach me how to play guitar.”
Playing guitar is exactly what Kayla Brown, 17, learned with GirlZone–and it has changed her life, she says. Before she unpacks her ever-present guitar to play for the barbecue crowd, she explains that she first tried to play guitar when she was 11 or 12. “My older brothers could play guitar, and they thought it was funny I wanted to play.”
That could have been the end of the story. Instead, she went to a GirlZone workshop. “They taught me how to play a Veruca Salt song. Ever since then, that’s what I’ve wanted to do.”
Brown also writes and sings her own songs. She briefly was part of a girl band, got signed onto a local label and is working on a solo album.
Amid all the you-go-girl! euphoria, the question is bound to arise–and Rickman says it does: What about a BoyZone?
“There needs to be a BoyZone,” Rickman says. “Boys also get lots of mixed messages. But there need to be spaces just for girls; we see the urgency in that right now.
“We’re not trying to say, `Girls rule, boys suck.’ We’re trying to say everybody needs to challenge these limitations put on them because of their gender. It stops people from being in touch with who they are, and I think that’s a crime.”
To Rickman and her crew, GirlZone is not an end in itself. They see the group as a seed planted in the community, hoping that other people will branch out and help girls too. Rickman says: “We want to say to local businesses, `Look, girls like doing this certain activity. So do something for these girls!'”
Giving back to the community
In turn, she says, GirlZone will support the community. “One of our missions is to support local economies. When we do our workshops, we want to buy our drumsticks from the local drum shop. We want to have our meetings at the local coffee shop owned by the woman entrepreneur. We’re a product of the community, and we want to support that.”
GirlZone already has launched what it plans to make an annual community event: Last April, it held GrrrlFest, with the theme “Throw Like a Girl.” GrrrlFest featured a series of workshops covering everything from billiards to yoga, showcased regional music groups, even compiled a “Throw Like a Girl” compilation CD made available at area record stores.
But growth for GirlZone won’t come cheap–not if Rickman has her way. The group is supported in part by the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation of Chicago, but it relies largely on volunteer work and donations. Rickman gets some grant money to coordinate GirlZone, but also waitresses and teaches tennis to support herself. She wants more grant money to support a paid staff.
“Women have traditionally given away their skills, and it’s not seen as work. I’d like us to get away from that,” she says. “We pay people who sell clothes and market crap to kids lots and lots of money. Our work is valued work, and it needs to be seen as valued work.”
But all that’s a worry for another time. Today it’s a gorgeous summer day, a great day to get girls up to the grill and teach them this is not just their daddy’s barbecue anymore.
Celinda Davis, 7, is proud of the campfire she helped build near the grills. She contemplates what she learned as she enjoys a hot dog she cooked. “It was a little scary,” she says, “but when people are around you, you feel safe.”
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Workshops pick up again in the fall. Check out the GirlZone Web site at www.prairienet.org/girlzone.
