October 11th, International Day of the Girl Child, is a time to celebrate the power and potential of young women everywhere. In honor of this day, we journey through the story of Be the Voice of Girls (BVG) – an initiative that began with a simple idea in Turkey and blossomed into a cross-cultural movement. This five-part retrospective series looks at BVG’s origins, its creative curriculum, the reflections of the girls themselves, the community that sustains it, and the road ahead. Written in a narrative style, these installments weave together anecdotes, participant voices, and program insights to paint a vivid portrait of BVG’s mission: empowering teenage girls through English and the arts to become confident, connected, and inspired leaders.
Part 1 — Origins & Vision: From a Living-Room Idea to a Movement
On a spring morning in Hatay, a young mother spread picture books across the floor and began to sing. She drew with colored pencils, staged tiny plays with paper dolls, and spoke in two languages so her daughter would grow up fluent in both. It was an ordinary room—soft light, the scuff of a chair, the blunt comfort of a family table—but the experiment underway was quietly radical: teach a new language the way you teach delight. Not as a set of rules, but as a way of imagining the world. In that room the method took shape: joy first, then grammar; art as the engine of speech; story as the spine of memory. Years later, those mornings would read like a preface. The mother would become the architect of a program; the living room would become a blueprint for a public space where girls could learn English by making things that mattered.
By late 2021, the private experiment had turned into a public invitation. With support from the U.S. Mission in Türkiye and a circle of local educators, Be the Voice of Girls opened as a 36-week pilot for ninth- and tenth-graders in Hatay. The premise was disarmingly clear: build a room where adolescent girls could practice English in public, make art with purpose, and be taken seriously by adults who listened. The curriculum braided watercolor to verb tenses, podcast microphones to past participles, a Saturday debate to a Sunday essay. The girls arrived tentative and curious. What they built together felt less like a class than a small community workshop with a bilingual heartbeat.
In February 2022, the program gained a second axis. From an Ohio kitchen table in Columbus, a co-founder began coordinating virtually alongside the founder in Hatay—trading lesson plans across time zones, recruiting guest mentors willing to beam in, and troubleshooting the invisible seams that make hybrid learning work. Zoom was not a compromise; it was a bridge. Cohort One closed with a showcase that stitched laughter to courage; Cohort Two opened larger, with returning students stepping—awkwardly at first, then with growing poise—into junior-mentor roles.
Then, before dawn on February 6, 2023, the ground convulsed. Earthquakes ripped through southern Türkiye and northern Syria. Hatay—BVG’s cradle—was among the hardest hit. The program’s center of gravity, its founding teacher, was lost, along with several bright girls from the early cohorts. What followed was a stunned quiet threaded with phone calls: students checking on one another, volunteers reaching across time zones, adults counting who was safe and who was gone. Grief did what grief often does—it tested the joints of a community and revealed where they held.
This is where the story’s second pillar, long present, stood taller. Mirey Baz had been there since the first flyers went up—she met the founder, Fatma Dodurka, during recruitment for the inaugural cohort, and she had pitched in from day one. In the weeks after the quake, she shouldered the local burden—calling families, securing rooms, re-knitting trust. From Columbus, coordination continued through sorrow: a relay of emails and Zooms, guest teachers persuaded into kinship, letters to would-be partners explaining that the program could not, would not, end. The tragedy also sent the Ohio co-founder into Rotary, where the project’s DNA—youth, literacy, peace through understanding—fit as if designed for it. BVG did not become smaller in loss; it became larger than any one life.
By autumn 2024, a third cohort gathered in a sunlit room taped with watercolor sunsets and word lists. A world map wore a confetti of sticky-notes: cities where mentors lived, places the girls wanted to visit, the routes language could take between them. Familiar voices arrived on the screen; a steady one held the room. The architecture had changed—hybrid by design, with local steadiness and global reach—but the promise was constant: every voice would be heard.
At its beginning, BVG’s vision was specific and humane. It did not claim to solve adolescence or to cure inequity; it promised, instead, to open a door. The door led to a room where the currency was participation, where art gave permission to speak, and where English was not a gate but a footbridge. In practice, that looked like a stack of sketchbooks, a borrowed projector, a USB microphone, a small speaker that made every phone a radio station. The work was incremental, and that was precisely the point. If you build a practice of courage in small rooms, courage travels.
The first cohorts made clear how far such an ethic could go. The early showcase—a patchwork of home corners turned into makeshift stages—became a ritual. Girls introduced their work to a listening world; families watched from kitchens; somewhere, a diplomat mouthed a surprised compliment; somewhere else, a volunteer in another time zone muted herself to cry. The measures that mattered most were not numerical—although placement tests and exit exams quietly captured gains in listening, reading, speaking, writing—but narrative: a parent reporting that the dinner table sounded different; a teacher noticing a reticent student raise her hand; an older sibling conscripted into listening to a practice speech. Even in its first year, BVG’s community began to extend beyond a single cohort as early participants returned to help, to model voice for those just arriving.
By 2022, the program’s global circuitry—its way of connecting a room in Hatay to a person somewhere else—grew more deliberate. Guest instructors joined from abroad—artists, writers, journalists, language coaches—each adding an instrument to the ensemble. Some sessions leapt continents; others only crossed neighborhoods. What mattered was the steadiness of the invitation and the seriousness with which it was received. BVG was not a charity performance where outsiders arrived to shine; it was a workshop where everyone worked. The girls practiced the art of the interview, learned to pitch a design idea, sang idioms until their mouths remembered the shape of them. In that sense the program was always larger than English; it taught how to inhabit a voice.
After the earthquakes, rebuilding meant more than securing a room. It meant recovering a rhythm. The logistics were unsentimental—who had a laptop, who needed transport, which walls could hold an exhibition, which Saturdays would be sacred again. But the moral work was delicate: honoring loss without centering it, letting grief be present without becoming the teacher, and holding the door open exactly as wide as before. That is the space where Mirey’s calm was decisive, where the transatlantic relay—one hand in Hatay, one hand in Columbus—kept time.
If the founding room supplied the method, the years since have furnished the vocabulary: hybrid as bridge, not compromise; showcase as civic practice, not performance; mentorship as a renewable resource. The images gather like emblems: a circle of teenagers bent over a mic for the first time; a sheet of paper dense with cross-outs and an unmistakably original sentence; a watercolor cityscape labeled in English, the word skylight written three times until it feels right; a guest’s face—the slight startle of recognition—when a question from a fifteen-year-old lands with adult weight.
These are small things. But movements worth keeping often begin with small things repeated faithfully. BVG’s origins are modest by design. It was never meant to be a spectacle. It was meant to be a room where speech is practiced until speech becomes voice, where a second language becomes a second way of belonging, where art is not a luxury but a form of literacy.
What happens in that room changes what happens outside it. A girl who has learned to hold a microphone learns, too, how to hold a room. A girl who has argued—in English, in her own register—finds she can argue for herself at school, with a bureaucrat, in front of a panel. A girl who has listened to a peer revise a sentence learns how to revise her own plans. This is not abstraction; it is civic pedagogy in miniature, the kind that spreads almost without announcement through families and neighborhoods.
The path from a living-room rehearsal to a hybrid program sustained by a transnational chorus of mentors can look, on paper, straightforward—proposal, grant, pilot, cohort, cohort, earthquake, repair, cohort—but the lived experience is braided: grief and grit, bureaucracy and improvisation, a Saturday morning in Hatay twinned with a Friday night in Ohio. If the story sounds improbable, it is only because we are unaccustomed to giving such attention to the ordinary mechanics of care.
By the start of the latest cohort, the project’s ethic was visible on the walls: painted scenes beside word lists; a map crowded with notes about where English might take you; a printout of an email from a volunteer promising to return next month; a schedule taped in the corner that makes the week feel possible. Underneath, a sturdier architecture had taken hold: local leadership under Mirey; a long-distance counterpart in Columbus; a roster of guest educators who treat teenage girls as peers in the making; and the administrative spine to carry the work farther than one room, one city.
BVG’s first chapter, then, is not only a tale of origins; it is a declaration of method. It argues—gently, by demonstration—that adolescent girls deserve pragmatic, beautiful spaces to practice voice; that languages should be learned in the wild with brushes, questions, songs, and plans; that adults should show up not as saviors but as witnesses and craftspersons; that grief can be carried in community without drowning the future; and that the distances that separate us can be traversed, not erased, by attention.
From here, the series turns outward. In Part 2 we’ll step inside the curriculum—how the program’s long Saturdays and quick weeknights knit a common fabric of making and meaning. By the end of this retrospective, we hope the map on your wall has grown crowded with notes of your own—places where your time, your skills, your introductions might make another Saturday possible.
For now, the room is set: sketchbooks stacked, the small speaker humming, the projector warm, the kettle just off the boil. The first prompt is ready. The door is open.
