The Walk-a-thon was an extremely outrageous experience! As you can see in the pictures Girls Club does not make small events. This event was a surprise to me. I didn’t know what to expect. On the day of the event, I was excited to find out what the Girls Club had pulled out of it’s sleeve. The day before they had made a bunch of girls pick out pink dresses to wear to the walk, but who wears a dress to walk? The Girls Club that’s who! Walking with a dress on was such an experience. The dress I choose was huge and long when I’m kinda short so it was difficult for me to walk in it. I had to hold my dress up the whole way and that got very uncomfortable. after a while expecially when i started to sweat…did i forget to mention how hot this dress was with all its fifty layers. The walk ended up  at the Girls Club and we were welcomed by the booming sound of The Hungry Marching Band and their clownish dancers. When we got to the handball court, the official end of the walk, the band gave a performance for a couple of hours which was so much fun and required the audience to be included in  their show. The band made us get up and dance. We played limbo and we even had a conga line. The whole experience was tons of fun. That’s life at the Girls Club!

Miriam Paula Fogelson, to us CL girls known as boss [Wo]man, lol just kidding, is a staff at the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC). She is one of those workers that works for the passion involved in the job. Miriam’s job here at LESGC started out in October 2004 as a volunteer teaching photography and writing once a week, then as time passed, she progressed to becoming a full time employee, fundraising part time, and running programs. Her current position is Director of Leadership, dealing with things like directing Cascading Leadership (CL), supervising the CL related staff, working with volunteers, making and dealing with partnerships, and organizing events dealing with leadership and activism.

A typical work day for her is coming in, checking her emails, responding to things that are going on at the time, going to staff meetings that may be going on during the day, dealing with a lot of organization programs, meeting with organizations, and supervising meetings. The main thing that she enjoys about her jobs is working with us, the CL members. Other joys that come with her job are things like working behind the scene, being able to see what becomes of her job, and working with other people who are passionate about their job and who are excited about coming into work everyday. She believes that the most challenging part of her job is having to juggle many projects at the same time and having limited time to get big projects running. Other challenges that she deals with is having limited resources to work with, also meeting other peoples needs and making them working with the needs of the program.

The advice she gives girls trying to reach their future goals is to “give themselves opportunities to learn and explore opportunities, to take advantage of all the opportunities available to them because you can never really know if you like something untill you try it. Also keep in touch with the people you know to build a net work of resources you can use in the future.”

The most inspiring advice she has received was to “follow your bliss, do what you want and have that meet your needs.” Note to CL girls she can always use your help to plan, prepare, organize, and even give her feedback.