By Keira Downing, Class of 2025
This article is a part of a series of student stories of growth curated for the 2025 One Event. If you enjoy this story, please donate and tell us which student’s story inspired you to give.
In my first year at One Stone, I did a Project Good called EmpowHER about empowering young women. It was also my first ever Project Good experience at One Stone. Celeste was the coach lead of our group as well as another student’s mom, Crystal. At the start of Project Good, we had a student lead named Ella, but after the second term of the year she had joined a sport which required her to be gone every Thursday. She unfortunately had to step down from being the student lead and because of that a spot opened up to lead the group. I had never really been the leader of a group like this so I didn’t really know what to do but I decided to jump into the role. Of course, Celeste was there to help me navigate most of it and I was able to grow a pretty close bond with her and the other girls in the group. Since we were working towards empowering young women we got to share our personal stories with each other and connect on things we didn’t know others had ever experienced.
We decided as a group that the best approach to helping young women would be to meet with different women around Boise and talk to them about their experience growing up. We asked them questions about their struggles with girlhood and what resources they wished they had at the time. After gaining a lot of insight and doing empathy work, we then narrowed down our meetings to potential partners we could work with. None of us had any idea what our final implementation for the group would be so we were hoping to find the right person to work with and brainstorm with them. I had done some research and found a woman in Boise who organizes mixers for local women-owned businesses to meet and exchange resources for each other. We met with her and loved her but there was one problem, she had never worked with younger girls and our target age group was 12-14 year old girls. We decided to keep searching and eventually found Wild Hearts Idaho, an organization that provides outdoor adventure programs for girls aged 12-18 to help empower them. They were more than happy to work with us, since they needed to find a way to get their word out and we needed a partner to help us achieve our goals.
After establishing other connections, like Martha at the Foothills Learning Center who let us use that space for our implementation, we began to plan a final event to get together a group of girls between the ages of 12 and 14 and hopefully empower them in some way. The brainstorming process for this event was long and tiring, we just couldn’t think of what would be engaging as well as empowering to the girls. Since we were going to be using the Foothills Learning Center for our event, the first thing set in place was a quick group hike to get to know each other and pick flowers together to make flower crowns. Our partner, Wild Hearts Idaho, had already established a leadership group of older teen girls, so they sent a few of them to help us lead our activities. These girls were much more experienced with this topic so to me it felt like they were helping us feel more empowered, too.
Overall the experience was empowering to me personally because I got to become a leader and help empower other girls while also forming good bonds with my teammates and coaches. Working with the younger girls was fun and challenging and I would love to do it again. I talked to one younger girl that was in our event and she told me she hadn’t felt this proud to be a girl in a little while which was both sad and encouraging to hear. I loved the group so much that I was hoping to join again the next year but it didn’t end up working out. The growth and insight I gained from this experience will always be something special to me and I hope to see groups like this continue around the world someday.
