Community

LES Club Grooms Girls for Better Future

By Mia Wright
Spectrum staff

Minutes before boarding a bus bound upstate for Camp Fowler, 50 members of the Lower East Side Girls Club were grabbing their bags and saying their good-byes. They were chatty, darting about and downright giddy.

“Traveling with my friends helped me grow without my mother there,” said camper Denise Bates,13, as the group prepared to hit the road.

Leaders of the club, founded in 1996 and in its state-of-the-art home for three years now, said teaching girls to be independent is just one aim of their many programs.

“The girls club is designed to help them find their voices … to advocate for themselves and be themselves,” said anthropologist Lyn Pentecost, a former NYU professor of female-focused literature and culture. She is the club’s co-founder and executive director.

“I have girls who wouldn’t get on the mic two years ago, and, now, won’t stop talking,” said Kelly Webb, who runs the club’s music production program.

Inside club’s three-story building on East Eighth Street is a girls’ science lab run by actual scientists; a 64-seat planetarium; a studio for recording and broadcasting Where Girl Radio Lives! over the internet; an arts studio; a digital photography studio; a fashion design room; event spaces; a kitchen fit for fancy chefs; and more. There are college and career preparatory programs, social justice programs, environmental education programs, a girl-made gift shop called La Tiendita.

“The girls club teaches us stuff we don’t learn in school … You learn how to market yourself and break stereotypes. It’s opened many doors for me,” said Kayla Wils, 19, also member of YaYas, a nonprofit organization for girls and boys that partners with the girls club.

Middle- through high-school girls can join the club, which especially aims to groom the girls in ways that may improve their living circumstances in the long run. While people with higher incomes have moved to the Lower East Side in recent years, many of its residents remain poor. And those are the families that the club targets.

In addition, the club is trying to do its part to increase the number of girls, for example, prepared for careers in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Men still dominate those fields.

Before the girls club was established, some neighborhood women complained that their daughters were not allowed to be a part of local boys clubs.

“We thought, ‘How can it be possible that we have three boys-only clubs and no place for girls to go?’” Pentecost recalled.

Pentecost collaborated with a group of Lower East Side mothers, workers, artists, educators, scientists, athletes, businesswomen and community activists to launch the club.

“They gave her things I couldn’t provide for her, things I didn’t even dream of as a little girl” said Annette Martinez, the mother of a girls club member who was heading to that Adirondack Mountains camp.

She held back tears as she talked about how her daughter has matured and overcome personal struggles since joining the club three years ago.

Among the headline-makers who’ve either visited the club personally, blasted news about it on social media or supported in it in other ways are actresses Rosario Dawson and Zoey Deutch; actor Glen Powell; recording artist DJ Khaled; celebrity singer Alicia Keys; and former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama.