My Nonprofit Reviews

Moving Creations is the perfect name for this program, and I have experienced exactly that. I met Emily in the Spring of 2004 and began working as the creative writing/poetry teacher a few weeks later. I was "moved" by her passion to "create" safe spaces of expression and power for adolescent girls. I was "moved" because of the ways in which my path mirrored theirs, that I had also been a girl navigating through the struggles of our racial/economic/ gendered/ spatial/inheritances. I had not known then the ways in which my life would be changed in the process, not only as a result of witnessing the power of one woman's passion to love and fight for these girls and their right to inhabit such spaces, but through baring witness to countless girls' "movement" through this program's "creative" processes. I watched girls enter,like cocoons- afraid, withdrawn, uncertain, devalued, distrustful, SILENCED--and leave as sister-butterflies--self-assured, hopeful, confident, trusting, present, having claimed agency through developing a love for the sounds of their own voices, the sight of themselves in the mirror, through friendship, through poetry, dance, through a passion for the power of seeing and being seen. Ive seen them grow to be young women, many of which had plans to enter college, had begun to see themselves as young scholars, as people who became concious of the music they listened to, of the words they chose to use, of their social trajectories, of their abilities, beauty, intelligence-- newly defined and refined. Moving Creations/Girls on the Move is definitely the most accurate name for this program because that is exactly what has occured. The girls have developed and "moved" in to the being and becoming of who they always were--beautiful "creations". Emily really deserves to be applauded, because she has undergone a number of sacrifices in order to keep this program running. Her work is phenomenal, just like heart and her vision for this program. Such programs really are the bottom line between life and death for a lot of young people, such as it was the case for me growing up (I had an "Emily" to cross my path). Young girls need spaces in which they wre invited to think of new ways of thinking and being in the world as they negotiate becoming women, and Moving Creations has provided that space not only for the girls as students but for myself as a teacher, and for that I am grateful. --peqce

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