thegirlsclub

This story starts

out like many great ideas do, with a bottle of wine and a couple of friends. Specifically, two of my close girlfriends and weekly “wine nights” our junior year of college. the intention of these nights were for us to “catch up” every week but if I am being honest now; we were really just scheduling into our calendars a weekly time to vent about all of our boy problems with a glass of moscato. We bonded over the messiness of college relationships and our frustration with the patriarchy because of the little and big ways that it inserted itself in our lives. Ironically, we had united to complain about guys but a common theme that kept emerging every week was how many wise, incredible, phenomenal women we had in our lives that were helping us navigate these trials. Each of us every week would mention women over and over that had given us great advice, inspiration, or was going through something similar.  We always expressed how much we wished that we all knew each other or that a certain person was with us at the moment to sit down and talk about whatever topic we were discussing.

This realization stayed with me throughout the year, and in the summer going into my senior year, I decided it was now or never to try to bring everyone together. This idea was important to me and it felt worthwhile to spend my last year of college prioritizing my relationships with other women. I knew that there had to be even more of these incredible women across campus who had different passions, majors, and ideas and most importantly, a shared desire to talk about all of those things. I made it my official goal for senior year to bring women together in a room to talk about topics and ideas that mattered to each of us and the idea of “girl’s club” was born.

I gathered my wine night women and we sat down and dreamed up what this idea I had could be in actuality. We scribbled down our thoughts on a big piece a paper and a manifesto of sorts came to life. Themes emerged that turned into pillars of the foundation of what this group would. The pillars were 1.) we want the conversation to be intentional and structured with topics that we could pick from every week 2.) this is a group for women by women and we were there to empower each other while diving into all the parts of society that were set up to tear us apart 3.) Most importantly, we want this to be an energizing experience for all so we will let as much as possible happen naturally and casually to avoid the stress of planning and facilitating for anyone.

We followed up the conversation by each throwing a couple of people into a groupchat to kick things off. September rolled around and on a Wednesday night, 8 of us gathered on my porch. Months later, we are still meeting and I have learned more than I ever thought I would from not only the other women but about happens when you bring a group of women together for intentional conversation.