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No. 15 Vol. 7
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July 2017
Millburn Girls Talk Impacts Today’s Youth
By Anastasia Marchese ast year, when Annika Sharma was perusing the Miss New Jersey Teen USA website, in which she was a contestant, she came across the organization, Girl Talk under the “Causes” link. She found that the pageant was a big supporter of the work that “Girl Talk” is doing. Sharma was a sophomore at Millburn High School at the time and member of their community service club, the Helping Hands Club. After finding out more about the Girls Talk organization, Sharma reached out to other girls from the Helping Hands Club to ask them if they would like to join her in starting a Milburn Girls Talk chapter. “I wanted to ask girls who would really care about it,” said Sharma. Joanne Kim, Cathy Kazakova, Katie Darvin and Bella Tjan came alongside Sharma to help lead the group.
Sharma’s mother, Jyoti Sharma, is the advisor for the chapter. According to the organization’s website, “Girl Talk (www.mygirltalk.org) is an international non-profit peer-to-peer mentoring program with a very simple premise: high school girls mentor middle school girls to help them deal with the issues they face during their formative early teenage years. Our mission is to help young teenaged girls build self-esteem, develop leadership skills and recog-
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nize the value of community service. Since 2002, our organization has served more than 40,000 girls in 43 states and seven countries.” Through weekly meetings held by local chapters the high school girls share their own stories of the stress and drama that go with the middle school years, helping the younger members of the group to prepare and persevere through an often difficult transition time. The Girl Talk website also sites some startling statistics. Data from 2009 suggests that, of the middle school girl population in the U.S: nine percent are pregnant; 22 percent never make it through high school a as they drop out; 27 percent have been or will be suicidal; 34 percent have eating disorders; 55 percent experiment with
alcohol, drugs or tobacco; of those with low self-esteem, 25 percent resort to self-injurious behavior; and 75 percent report engaging in activities such as disordered eating, cutting, bullying, smoking or drinking. All of these numbers clearly underscore that there is a need to reach young women to help them through these middle school years. Girl Talk is impacting the lives of young women positively with the power of peer-to-peer mentoring. “The good news is that data also suggests that youth who are mentored are: 27 percent less likely to begin using alcohol, 37 percent less likely to skip class, 46 percent less likely to begin using illegal drugs, 52 percent less likely to skip school, are more confident in their academic continued on page 2