Schoolgirls secure a space of their own

Process provides lessons in carpentry, bureaucracy for Oak Park students

Ellen Fox, Special to the Tribune. Chicago Tribune

Dec 24, 2003 

Virginia Woolf may have advocated that women writers must have "money and a room of [their] own," still it's hard to imagine wrangling the money or wielding a power drill in order to build such a room.

Today's budding female activists don't face quite the struggle that Woolf did. In Oak Park, 4th- and 5th-grade girls recently got an early education in just what it takes to secure a space of their own. Awarded a grant from Sisters Empowering Sisters, a dozen girls built their own clubhouse in the back of a classroom at Washington Irving Elementary School. 

Christened Spoon--space of our own--the narrow, pillow-filled wooden booth--which stretches across the back of a classroom--is the product of hours of meetings and construction that started in fall 2002, when one girl's mother learned about Sisters Empowering Sisters, a program through which girls can apply for grants for empowerment projects. 

At first, introducing the then 4th- and 5th-graders to the laborious process of getting grant money--not to mention trying to help them come up with a suitable project--was "a huge undertaking," says Rebekah Levin, who rounded up a group of her daughter Ariel's interested friends. 

"They had very little understanding of philanthropy," says Levin, who, as the head of a non-profit that receives grant money from the program's parent organization, the Chicago-based Girl's Best Friend Foundation, does this same kind of work on a larger scale. 

"I remember somebody wanted to have fundraisers. They thought that maybe that's what they were supposed to be encouraged to be doing," she recalls. "And it's like, well, no, the idea is that there's a fundraiser to help you do something, but you've got to figure out how you're going to do something that's going to make a difference for more than the 8 or 12 of you. It has to have an impact on girls that's meaningful." 

After whittling down some of their more grandiose ideas about what they could do with a few thousand dollars ("They wanted to build enormous things," recalls Levin, like an addition to the school), the girls decided to construct a girls' meeting and reading space that might foster communication across the school's racial and class boundaries. 

"Usually, the African-Americans hang out with the African- Americans and the white kids hang out with the white kids and we kind of wanted to bring them back together," says Ariel Levin, 10. By building the space together and hosting speakers of interest, she explains, "we could make friendships and realize the similarities: You're all girls." 

But once the transcendent possibilities of Spoon had been agreed upon, it was time for the girls to enter the less glamorous world of getting the money. 

First, there was the nerve-racking process of filling out--by hand--the kid-friendly application, which detailed the purpose and cost of the project. 

Then came the sit-down interview with two members from the all- girl grant committee. Some of the girls felt more comfortable explaining their project to the high school-age grantmakers than they would have been speaking to adults, but others still worried they would forget something. 

"I was blushing," recalls Ayshe Yeager, 10, of the interview, but "I felt as though I accomplished something." 

Finally, in December 2002, the girls received word that they had been granted $1,980. Screams ensued. 

With instruction from one of the girls' fathers, Alec Bloyd- Peshkin, a carpenter, and his assistant, Sara Elich, they set to designing and building the structure, learning how to stain, saw, drill, sand and stencil--all without help from boys. 

"The boys basically would take our glory away," explains Caylee Shadrake, 10. "When you're working on something that usually a man would do, you kind of feel like, I can do this, and you feel happy." 

"You feel strong, muscular," adds Nichelle Hibbler, 10. 

"Like a god," says Sarah Pooley, 11, "like a goddess." 

But even goddesses, it seems, face obstacles. The girls were occasionally thwarted by building requirements and public-school rules; boys, of course, must be allowed in the space, too. 

They also have yet to achieve the racial and class diversity they first envisioned: The girls involved in the initial effort were largely white, and while there was a showing by Asian and black girls and parents at an Oct. 27 inaugural visit by state Rep. Karen A. Yarbrough (D-Maywood), they were middle to upper class. 

Still, their principal considers such challenges essential. 

"It was a great learning process for them, learning about the bureaucracy of trying to build something inside of a school," says principal Felicia Starks Turner. "I think it helped them understand a little bit about why some adults even have difficulty crossing racial lines or pulling people from different races together. It has taken a little bit longer and it's teaching them patience."