By Sara O’Malley
Stephanie Musso’s enthusiastic attitude is nearly contagious.
Get her talking about Strong Women, Strong Girls (SWSG), a nationwide mentor program for inner-city girls of which she founded a chapter at Northeastern, and it’s hard not to catch on to her positive outlook.
Musso defines the program as “a supporting community of strong women and girls for the future and the promoting of positive change.”
SWSG pairs undergraduate college females with girls in grades three through six at area elementary schools. The chapter is in its second year and is currently working with four Boston public schools.
“We reach different demographics,” Musso said.
The group makes weekly trips to the schools where tutors divided into sets of three work with an assigned group of 10 to 15 girls. Armed with binders, lesson- plans, journals and plenty of stickers, the mentors seek to teach the girls about communication, diversity and goal setting.
“Each week, we exemplify and feature one contemporarily historic female role model,” Musso said. “We show the girls how to apply them to their own lives.”
The girls fill out weekly journals, in which they write to their mentors and receive positive feedback responses from their mentors, Musso said. They also complete an art project which “involves an insane amount of glitter, glue, markers and stickers,” she said.
Musso said she noticed the girls are usually very guarded at first but over time, they tend to form special relationships with their mentors .
“You’re sort of their friend and not totally their teacher,” Musso said. “And it is a cycle of mutual empowerment. We learn as much from them as hopefully they’re learning from us.”
The main objective of the group is to provide positive reinforcement, or “SWSG love,” to girls and tutors alike.
“All our members are so positive to each other,” Musso said. “It propels and snowballs from the leaders, to the mentors, to the girls.”
From October through April, the mentors generally work from five to six hours per week, splitting that time with each of the groups at the four elementary schools.
True to the group’s name, the young girls aren’t the only ones benefitting from their involvement in SWSG.
The best part of being involved, Musso said, is “seeing the effect we have on the girls. Just seeing the radiance and positivity from them makes it so worth it. I’d do it forever if I could.”
