WORTHINGTON SCHOOLS

Student-Led Inner Beauty Club Encourages Girls to “Be What You Want to Be”

Lauren Carpenter and Audrey Yates, students at Worthington Park Elementary School, are one of the many great examples of where our Worthington Students are “Changing the World.” Their imagination and intuitiveness, and the encouragement from the administration and teachers at Worthington Park Elementary, has resulted in a program that helps build confidence in girls.

Carpenter and Yates were struck by an idea to create their own club after seeing the good that came out of an experience with Ruling Our Experiences (ROX), but they took it a step further.

“ROX is a girl group that teaches girls about confidence and inner beauty,” Yates explained. “Only 10 girls could be in it, so we got the idea to create a group for girls who couldn’t go to that club. We wanted them to have an experience like that, too.”

The result was Inner Beauty with Confidence (IBC). The girls host meetings during lunch hour once a week, and have talks about the challenges that still face women in the world today.

“With social media these days, there are all these models out there that are so skinny and all photo shopped,” Yates said. “We don’t want girls to look at that and think, ‘that’s what I need to look like.’ We wanted to start this to show girls that you don’t have to look like that and that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

Principal Asia Armstrong was on board from the start, wanting to give students the freedom to find their voice without too much interference.

“We discuss topics and we talk about confidence, happiness and kindness,” said Yates. “We’ve talked about female role models in the world and the girls did a project on female role models that they look up to.

“We talk about feminism and what it means to be a feminist and leadership and the virtues around the school like respect and trustworthiness.”

The pair hopes to soon have a woman who has found success in the professional world speak to the group of 8-10 girls, giving them a perspective of where we are as a society now, and where we could be once these elementary school students reach adulthood.

“You don’t have to act like a ‘normal’ girl and you don’t have to do everything that everyone else is doing,” added Carpenter. “You can be what you want to be.”