Black Girl Magic is getting ready for the new year by offering free swimming lessons through the YMCA in January. The founder and executive director of Black Girl Magic Educational Services Inc., Rosa Thompson, recently reflected on a past year full of connections and services for Black girls around the Madison area.
“We’ve ended strong with all of our programs. We’ve successfully turned our Melanated Mindfulness Camp into a full-day camp for a week, we continued with Black Girl Magic Saturdays, and we hosted our first in-person Black Girl Magic conference since 2019, which was amazing, It felt really good to be back in person. We’ve been creating new connections with other community-based organizations. We’re just really proud of the work that we’re doing. We added four youth employees, and that’s something that was very important to me, that our programs were youth-led and youth-planned. For the younger girls to see our high schoolers and our eighth graders as leaders and employees is important to me, and it feels good to put a little bit of money in their pocket.”
She continued to say, “I get everything that goes into swimming, Body image of wearing swimsuits, our hair and ways to keep that nice while swimming, but then still wanting to have fun in the water. It’s 90 degrees, you want to get in the water. I get everything that goes along with it, and why people in our community don’t always learn how to swim, but it’s a life skill that’s necessary in my opinion. You don’t have to learn how to swim like an Olympic swimmer or to be on a swim team, but I believe that everyone should learn to swim enough to save their own life.”
Being able to provide a safe and comfortable environment for the girls is at the core of what drove Thompson to the idea of swim lessons. She stated that the, “YMCA reached out to us to ask about ways that we could partner and I immediately thought about swimming lessons, Our girls need to learn how to swim, so we have swimming lessons that are just for our Black Girl Magic girls. I think a lot of that will remove feeling self-conscious about body image, especially with this age group…If all of that goes well and we have enough interest, then the YMCA is willing to continue to do swimming lessons with our girls. The classes are super small, they’re eight girls per class. They really have that one-on-one attention so that we can really get them swimming.”
The organization will also be giving swim caps to attendees as well as providing transportation to any girls that need it. Sign-up ends soon and classes are going to be offered at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels. The first lessons will be starting on January seventh and last seven weeks with a second session starting after that.
Thompson concluded in saying, “We are already looking forward to the [Black Girl Magic] conference, which will be May 25th, 2023, back at Madison College, We are super excited about that. We’re excited about the Melanated Mindfulness Camp, and we’re already planning for that. Our Black Girl Magic Saturdays will be sponsored by the American Girl’s Fund for Children for 2023, so we’re excited to strengthen those and have dedicated funding to each Saturday. We can really make sure that we are meeting all of the girls’ needs and doing activities that our girls really want to do … especially activities our youth advisory board plans, and we’re continually working with our youth advisory board, so we’re excited for that.”
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