Students Reflect on First Sessions of Empowering Female Voices: President’s First 100 Days

Students attended online sessions Monday and Thursday where they joined with other schools nationwide for discussion. Following are reflections from two of the Foxcroft students who attended.

This was the first meeting of the new session so most of it was getting to know the staff and other students participating in the program. There were people from all over joining us to talk about the world’s issues, which was really exciting. We briefly talked about the first 100 days of the Biden presidency and how it compares to former presidents' historical first 100 days. We will continue to recap and talk about things that President Biden is doing for our country in future meetings. We also talked about the main topics that we would be focusing on in this session: environmental justice, criminal justice, educational equity, healthcare, and economic inequality. This is my first time with Empowering Female Voices and I am very excited to continue to learn about these important topics. 

During our last meeting, we were split up into different groups based on what policy issue we wanted to focus on. Some of our choices were healthcare inequity, environmental conservancy, criminal justice, etc. I chose the healthcare inequity group. 

Our instructor first asked us why we chose healthcare inequality as our main interest. Many girls said they were interested in a future medical career, some had a newfound interest due to COVID-19, and some said this topic was the one they knew the least about and they wanted to learn about it. I found interest in this myself due to COVID. Then we were split up into breakout rooms with girls from all over the country, where we discussed some of the root causes of not being able to access healthcare — discrimination, having a criminal record, homelessness being among them — and the symptoms of not having it — decrease in a population’s health overall, rising infection rates, unsafe abortion practices, and choosing between difficult necessities (paying rent or feeding families over healthcare). 
    
Empowering Female Voices is a great opportunity to learn and develop opinions on important current-day issues. Personally, I know that this program has educated me in many ways, allowing me to not only have an opinion on a policy but also have evidence to back it up.