JewelGirls

JewelGirls has always been one of the deepest joys of my life.

I founded it in 2008 with my then FAIR Girls team on a belief that felt simple and revolutionary at the same time: every girl — no matter what she has survived, no matter what has been done to her or taken from her — is a jewel. And jewels don't stop shining because someone failed to see them.

We started the way the best things do: with donated beads, a borrowed table, and an invitation. DC friends dropped off supplies. We quietly reached out to girls living at Sasha Bruce Youthwork, a youth shelter right here in the city. Every Saturday, my small team and I would metro over, walk to the shelter, and spend the morning with girls who came from all across DC. No fanfare. Just beads everywhere, and girls making something beautiful.

Over the years JewelGirls grew into something I hadn't fully imagined when we started. Twice a week, for four hours at a stretch, teen girls and young women came together to design and make handcrafted jewelry — learning inventory and packaging, pricing and customer service, design and online sales — while also doing the quieter, deeper work of healing. We named our therapy dog Jewel after the program. We sold pieces at diplomatic receptions and civic galas. We took JewelGirls to Uganda, where 55 girl survivors earned real income through jewelry they made with their own hands. We had a presence at international events. And through all of it, the girls kept showing up — for the jewelry, yes, but mostly for each other.

Why now. Why again.

Each year, about 10,000 young people in DC experience housing insecurity, and more than 2,000 experience literal homelessness on any given night. Seventy percent are Black. Forty percent identify as LGBTQ+. And ninety percent of unhoused young parents in DC are women. In DC's youth homelessness system, roughly 1 in 12 girls without a parent or guardian has reported being sex trafficked. Between 31 and 46 percent of young people who age out of foster care experience homelessness before they turn 26.

These are not abstract numbers. These are the girls I have spent my life walking alongside. And when I moved back to DC last year and started reaching out to former JewelGirls — women now in their late twenties and thirties — what they told me stopped me in my tracks.

They are still in touch. Still a community. Still showing up for each other — across jobs and moves and babies and hard years. I had not expected JewelGirls to become a lifelong sisterhood. But it did. And that told me something important: this program doesn't just teach girls to make jewelry. It teaches them to belong to something. To each other. To themselves.

So here we go again. A few of the original JewelGirls are joining me to bring the program back — and we are bringing it home, to Sasha Bruce Youthwork, exactly where it all began. This is a full-circle moment. It is also, honestly, one of the greatest joys I have felt in years.