Oh the "Power of Your Purse"

1. I love strong women.
2. I love an excuse to dress up.
3. I love Grand America's dinners.

Thus, I was destined to love the "Power of Your Purse" event last Thursday at the Grand America Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City. It was a celebration of the several hundred female leaders in Salt Lake who make up the Women's Leadership Council. As a branch of the United Way, they donate money with the specific intent that it will go toward helping education. To let these women see where their money goes, the event planners bring in three female students each year from the schools benefitting from this involvement.

By some fortuitous stroke of luck, Cottonwood High School is that school. When the Granite School District shut down the dysfunctional "Granite High School," Cottonwood subsumed a lot of the students from South Salt Lake, a lower SES neighborhood. Consequently, United Way now supports Cottonwood since they are interested in anyone who works with the South Salt Lake population.

Another lucky coincidence is that I teach the Leaders/Latinos In Action program at CHS, which is funded through United Way. All of this adds up to being asked to bring three of my girls to the event as panel members who would talk about their family backgrounds, their challenges, and their aspirations. Initially, I was not nervous at all because I was thinking this panel was all about them. And to an extent it was. But little did I realize that the moderator, which I was, played a big role in the success of the overall panel. When we got to the ballroom and I noticed just how many hundreds of seats there were, I started to feel nervous. Thankfully we were scheduled in the middle of the program, a program centered on female leaders who strive to empower more women. That topic was enough to get me pumped up. I think the panel was a success, especially since so many people sincerely congratulated us. The next day at work, one of the science teachers even showed me a text sent to him by one of the leading doctors in the area who said to congratulate us. If nothing else, it reminded me how much I love these girls and women who make a difference.

Dipika from Nepal, Stephanie Pesantes who is the Latinos in Action President, myself, and Taylor Holding who is from the South Salt Lake neighborhood, an honors student, and here because they needed a white female for the audience. 

The awkward picture of me that a friend (who was in the audience without me realizing) took of me on the screens while moderating...and then posted on Facebook.