Besides the blogs that we have been posting to Independent Seminar, The Girl Narrative recently launched our own blog page that includes written articles/blogs, our podcast titles UnCut: The Girl Narrative Podcast, and videos! All of these blogs will be posted on Sundays and we will be posting the first episode of UnCut this Sunday 4/28/2019! Today, I will be looking at the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of our media/blog pages! Continue reading
Establishing another organization as your partner is not just a title or something you get to mention on your website. Having relationships with other nonprofit organizations or other business professionals who are in the same field as you and/or specialize in something you need to be done is crucial to the survival of your company. So…how do you get a partner and maintain your relationship? Continue reading
I changed the name of my nonprofit from Project G.I.R.L to The Girl Narrative this previous summer 2018, and I don’t think I could have made a better decision for my business.
For the first 4 months of being Project G.I.R.L, things were going as any new business was going; we were beginning to build our foundation, our audience, and our marketing plan for the future. Later on, there were several issues that presented themselves that caused me to seriously reconsider our name.
1. Project G.I.R.L is great…but it’s generic
a. When I really got to thinking about it, When you hear the name Project G.I.R.L, you have no idea what we do, who we are, or what our goals are. It is beautiful and fantastic but is overall too generic. When you are building the foundation of your business there are two incredibly important things you need to have: consistency and clarity.
2. There were other organizations that had similar names
a. I remember when I was interviewing Gauri Kapoor, CEO and founder of the after-school program The Girl and I (read our article about her daughter in the program here!), she got confused because she tried to look us up, but found another nonprofit organization. This was also not a one-time-incident. We were constantly confused with other organizations that sounded similar or had similar elements to Project G.I.R.L
3. Our message wasn’t clear
a. This is the biggest reason that we changed our name. Project G.I.R.L tells you nothing about what we want to achieve or why we are important. You would be able to guess that we had something to do with young female empowerment, but other than that, you would have no idea what we do.
The Girl Narrative is unique, our own, and clearly states what we do. We TELL the Girl Narrative. We tell the stories of strong young women to inspire girls to be limitless. Now, with our new name, our partners like March Against Revenge Porn, Nonprofit Jenni, Live Girl (and more!), our audience, and our future customers (HINT! HINT!) will be able to find us, know us, and connect with us better. It doesn’t make it effortless, running a business is never effortless, but it does make things a little easier.
Citations:
Kapoor, Gauri. “Home.” The Girl And I, http://www.thegirlandi.com/.
Schoenborn, Sabrina “Mahika Chopra.” The Girl Narrative,
https://thegirlnarrative.com/mahika-chopra/
Juliett, Leah. “#MARCH AGAINST REVENGE PORN.” March Against Revenge Porn,
marchagainstrevengeporn.org/.
Hargrove, Jenni. “Home.” Nonprofit Jenni, http://www.nonprofitjenni.com/.
West, Sheri. “Home.” LiveGirl, golivegirl.org/.
Schoenborn, Sabrina “Home.” The Girl Narrative, http://www.thegirlnarrative.com/.
Running a business has truly been a test of patience. Being told no all day every day is exhausting, there is no way around that. It feels as if there is only a descent. As someone who was expecting some ups and downs, it was a harsh reality to realize that, for most of my process, it has been a straight descent. Continue reading
It’s the end of the semester, and I have 47 pages of polished writing. What have I shown?
I believe I’ve given an example of a mutually positive relationship between the U.S. government and a mainstream print media outlet, due to which the public reaction to a foreign policy event was to some degree determined by the coverage given by the print media outlet. I have demonstrated the connection between the foreign policy aims of American foreign policy leaders during and after the Six-Days’ War and those advocated and legitimized by the print coverage of the War by the New York Times. Further, I have explicated the symbiotic relationship between sources of information thought to be authoritative and credible, and the disseminators of that information, in order to substantiate the logical basis for that relationship in this specific instance of foreign policy. Continue reading
On May 2nd at 8:00 am on the nose, I hit enter and The Girl Narrative went live. It was accessible to the whole world, and I felt extremely exposed.
The way I had described it to my friends, was that I had a baby: I had been preparing in every way, shape, and form for months and then all of a sudden, one day, it just existed. It came into the world and seemed to take on a life of its own. I understand that this analogy is intense and a little crazy because it is. Continue reading
I have finally reached my goal of being able to sit in classes of both middle school and lower school. At the moment, it is challenging trying to balance out class time with eighth grade and lower school, but I am managing to find times to get good experience. The remainder of my month will be tough as well because I need to choose whether to focus more on eighth grade, or fifth grade.
It’s a pretty good feeling, staring at page 47 of 47, at a draft that’s . . . rough, admittedly, but that also feels finished, feels completed. My mentor T. Olga has been looking over it this past weekend, and I’m anticipating her feedback and looking forward to refining my writing into a second draft. I’m sticking to my timeline well so far — I met my goal of finishing the first draft by May, and the second and third drafts by the time of my evaluation.
Another piece of my subsequent drafts will be formatting, of course, a different in-text citation style, and graphics. I haven’t had much experience with graphics before, but seeing as I’ve done intense analytical research into newspaper articles, parsing through them for several weeks, it would be useful to the reader if I condensed all that reading into a chart marking the evolution of the angle of the NYT’s coverage. Having done a preliminary ‘X’ chart, this is what the coverage looks like:
From this, it’s visually clear that the coverage shifts from a description of the conflict itself to a nearly uniform coverage of the diplomatic battle that went on in the UN in the aftermath, with a particular focus on the Soviet and Israeli delegates, Alexsei Kosygin and Abba Eban.
There is also the matter of visualizing the relevant history and foreign policy. I took some inspiration for this from the Gantt chart I created back in sophomore year as part of T. Steve’s Design-Engineering Seminar. It’s meant to be used as an ultra-specific task planner, with flexibility to assign different types of tasks to different people over an indefinite period of time. Here’s how I adapted it for my purposes:
Lastly, a quick update on publishing options: there is one for which a submission is due by May 15th, but with everything else going on up until the end of May, I won’t feel ready to submit for publication until the last few weeks of school.
Overall, exciting things all around going into the last month of fine tuning and reworking.
— EDM
Eight more pages! I’m finished with the entire media section, and started the synthesis of the history and the media narrative. Being at this point in the first draft is a similar feeling to being at the same point in my outline: I can envision the conclusion of my argument, and that’s supremely exciting. So far, this section has been the most fun to organize and structure, mainly because it’s my own — my own argument, that I get to craft to be the strongest it can be.
I’m doing well at listening to my willingness to write at any given time, and writing a few paragraphs here and there as I feel like it, or working through what I’ve written and rearranging points to my argument, and this seems to be how this particular paper wants to be written. Creating content still takes priority, most of the time, but for this section especially from time to time I spend a little bit here and there refining it.
I expect to finish the first draft by the end of the month, and then it’ll be time for T. Olga to sink her teeth into it — her words, not mine.
So it goes . . .
— EDM
This week, I started my extensive research on Nefertiti. I have been having some trouble with this chapter, because it is just about one person. There is so much to say about her and how she lived her life. I don’t know yet how to best craft the way to present my understanding of her. Do I locate her as wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, or Pharaoh? There are a lot of aspects to her that I could to zoom in on and elaborate on. I began with researching Akhenaten, her husband, as well as his father. The reader needs to have some background of the family Akhenaten is coming from, as well as Nefertiti’s family.
Another struggle I am having is identifying and explaining all the different theories inside this Amarna period. There are a lot of different scholars who argue that Nefertiti was pharaoh in her own right and some who argue that she was not. I have to account for both sides, and it is difficult to explain both. I want to accentuate the beauty and magic of Nefertiti while also making her immortal. It is my job to show and not tell her story, and try to paint a vivid enough picture for the reader.
Here is a sample I have from my Nefertiti chapter:
Every pharaoh was viewed as divine, carrying the regal and magical bloodline of Horus. Essentially every member of every royal family in every dynasty transcended the material and mortality. They were embodiments of nature. Ancient Egyptian Religion was so synonymous and in touch with nature itself that to transcend Earth was to go further into nature. Akhenaten and Nefertiti, more so Nefertiti, surpassed this, and this idea of Nefertiti not just representing Godlihood but actually tying together mortality as well as this ascension through life itself will be further discussed in depth throughout this chapter.
Source for Photo:
Egyptian Museum Berlin, editor. “Nefertiti.” Society for the Promotion of the
Egyptian Museum Berlin, edited by Society for the Promotion of the Egyptian
Museum Berlin, http://www.egyptian-museum-berlin.com/c53.php. Accessed 9 Apr.
2018.
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