Anisa Johnson Capstone

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man...We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.” This is a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from her TED talk We should all be Feminists. For my capstone my partner Rayna and I wanted to explore over the past two years what we could do to make sure Bask In Your Beauty doesn’t die. Bask In Your Beauty was founded by Jada Thomas and Zoie Jones, Rayna and I were first generation students of BIYB. Now, we are in the fourth year and we have been passed the baton to lead. Throughout the past two years we have figured out different ways to reach as many young ladies in SLA as we could. Two years and almost 35 girls later we completed a successful year. Our specific goal this year was reaching the girls to help them be a better support system to each rather than upholding the stereotype of girl drama and “beef.” To do this we would constantly make the girls work together to do create and complete tasks. This capstone helped me grow in my ideas of what I would like to do in the rest of the world and keeping the program going wherever I go. These girls give me a purpose to be a role model and always showing them to expect nothing but the best out of themselves. I’m grateful that this program was passed on to me and I’m even more excited to watch the evolution in BIYB after I leave SLA.