Meet Myra Hollis of Fem Scholar in Inglewood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Myra Hollis.

Myra, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Fem Scholar was created in 2014 with the goal in mind to help inner-city women go to college while still serving as a sisterhood in the community of Inglewood/ Los Angeles.

The idea of Fem Scholar was completely random. I’ve always had the desire to help teenagers from my community because it was so rare to hear of those around me going on to college. Once I shared my idea with my best friend she immediately wanted to help me out. After planning everything out she helped me with the very first meeting and since then Fem Scholar has taken off. We meet once a month with a goal for the workshops that we achieve by the end of the meeting. We are now in our fifth year and the program has grown tremendously. Getting to where we are today has been a journey, we thankfully have a main space where we meet and a strong group of mentors who were also in FEM Scholar while in high school. But we are continuing to grow with hopes of becoming a community center.

Our tag line is “Working to ensure the success of young women from backgrounds where achieving success through education seems impossible. ”

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has been far from a smooth road. In the beginning, we had to search for places to meet and often times had to get creative when the places we wanted to use were already booked. Outside of that struggle everything else always seemed to fall into place. I am beyond thankful for the solid group of mentors that have gone above and beyond to help me (Destiny and Danielle) I do not know what I do without them. In the beginning, I tried to do everything on my own but with this group of women they do not let that happen and that has strengthened our community/ sisterhood even more.

Fem Scholar – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from others?
FEM Scholar is a mentoring program that focuses on helping young women from high school go to college. Septemeber to December we focus on developing essays for college applications and scholarships. January to June we focus on self-love, self-care and developing sisterhood, I think I am most proud of the relationships that are built-in FEM Scholar it is a real genuine sisterhood. In our meetings, we go deeper than the surface and we have yet to have a meeting where we have not cried both tears of sadness and happiness. What sets us apart from others is our rawness, we have created a space for everyone to be comfortable in being themselves and even space to express when they feel that they can’t be themselves.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The proudest moment of FEM Scholar so far has been expanding into a program that also caters to college-aged women. This year we launched FEM Scholar 2.0 which is a virtual version of FEM Scholar for both undergraduate and graduate students. Adding this part of FEM Scholar has been a proud moment because it gives a chance for the girls that were in FEM Scholar in high school to continue in the program even if they moved away for school.

Outside of this, I think that every year sending the girls off to college is a proud moment because we can laugh about the stress that they went through to get to that moment and also celebrate them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://femscholar.wordpress.com/
• Email: femscholar@gmail.com
• Instagram: femscholar
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/femscholar/

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