In honor of International Day of the Girl, Glamour held The Girl Project Rally on Wednesday, October 11. Uzo Aduba, aka OITNB’s beloved Crazy Eyes, hosted the rally, welcoming talented speakers including Cory Booker, Ashley Graham, Freida Pinto, Yara Shahidi, Cleo Wade, and Herieth Paul.
The lineup was diverse in both profession and race, providing young girls with amazing examples that they could both relate to and be inspired by. Speakers included everyone from a New Jersey Senator, Model, Activist, Poet, Actress, among other talented professionals.
West Side’s Merkin Concert Hall hosted 300 high schools from Glamour’s partnering organizations like She’s the First, Girls Inc., CARE, and the Lower East Side Girls Club. At the end of the rally, the girls got to go home with their very own State backpacks, as a part of STATE’s well known “bag drops.”
The event was live streamed across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Glamour.com. Girls were encouraged to send in their questions using the hashtag, #AskLikeAGirl and #Glamour4Edu.
The Girl Project, Glamour’s global organization, raises money to provide secondary education to young women worldwide. Nearly fifty million young girls don’t have access to education due to issues like child marriage, unsafe conditions, and expensive school fees.
Check out some of our favorite quotes from the rally below.
“Whatever someone thinks is wrong about you, whether it’s your opinion or your body, that’s actually your superpower.”
-Ashley Graham
“The most monumental thing that we can do in this room is to support one another and with this support we can create a network so strong that no one, no text book, no class, no policy, no man, no politician, can have the audacity to ignore us.”
-Yara Shahidi
“When it comes to the work of the women before us, we may not be able to pay it back but we can certainly pay it forward.”
-Cleo Wade
“We have to let the whole world know that we are demanding equality in education whether it’s girls in America, girls in India, girls in Pakistan, girls anywhere all over the world are equal.”
-Friedo Pinto
“Our society needs to condemn this type of behavior by saying that our generation, and in this case your generation, that we are going to change this reality by making it absolutely unacceptable anywhere in our society when we see harassment.”
-Cory Booker
‘I said, “Can you call me Zoe?” And she stopped…and gave me that mother look that mothers know and have and said, “Why…?” And I said, “Because no one can say Uzoamaka.” And she looked at me and she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky, and Michelangelo, and Dostoyevsky, then they can learn to say Uzoamaka.” And I never asked her again. And what is amazing now standing in my womanhood, in my power is, I wouldn’t change my name for a second. I am so proud of that name.’
-Uzo Aduba
