Today we’d like to introduce you to Myra Hollis
Hi Myra, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
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. ”
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
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.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
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 sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
We are hoping to begin offering scholarships of our own for the girls that go through the program.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: FEMscholar
