By Tammy Tibbetts, Co-Founder & CEO of She’s the First

Before 2020, I didn’t know much about cryptocurrency. As a nonprofit CEO, I look at the dollars sitting in our bank account every day, so I constantly think about how to raise more dollars. The thought of raising crypto felt so abstract, like trying to find Monopoly money in the dark. It just didn’t feel real, and I was more than a bit skeptical.

But then our Development and Communications Manager, Henah Parikh, persistently advocated for us to accept crypto like Bitcoin with The Giving Block, a cryptocurrency donation platform…

Girls’ futures are at stake during a global pandemic — here’s why it matters and what we can do about it

By Christen Brandt and Tammy Tibbetts

On Fridays, Margaret Sam and Dereque Davies put on their masks and gloves and load up Davies’ truck with supplies, ready to do all they can to limit the impact of this pandemic. They’re based in Freetown, Sierra Leone, one of the epicenters of the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic, so they know the havoc a health crisis can wreak. …

POEM | By She’s the First Scholars in Uganda, led by Esther

In the olden days
To be born a girl
Was a curse.
Yes, a curse.

Nobody recognized her
When decisions were made
A word from her
Was nonsense.
The kitchen-her office.
A girl as if made
To toil and suffer.

Those days, are they gone?
Girls still suffering.
The majority left with lifetime injuries.

Girl, oh girl.
Good food is taboo for her.
A good child just like their father;
A foolish one resembles their mother.

Inheritance of a girl unheard of
This land, for our boy-child.
But I…

by Amanda Gorman, first-ever Youth Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Visit shesthefirst.org/dayofthegirl for an illustrated version of the poem.

Power unfurls in a girl at school
like the first pages of a book unwritten,
She’s a story waiting to ignite.

An educated girl is like the question the first rain
tosses at the earth
after the drought —
Are you ready to start again?

A girl who dreams to be the first in her line
to go to school
is the most vivid of things —
like the one red spark that stands up to the sky
in a chorus of wet logs…

This month, the STF community is discussing women’s health around the world, from tampon taxes to reproductive rights and maternal health. STF Scholar Deepa took the opportunity to share more about the practice of chhaupadi, a local tradition for women on their periods in Western Nepal. The following piece is in her words, with edits for clarity.

by Deepa Bohara Mijar, STF Scholar at BlinkNow

Chhaupadi is a unique tradition practiced by girls and women in Nepal during menstruation. In this, women are kept in the the cow shed of a separate place (also called a chhau goth) for 13…

Here’s why She’s the First Scholars in Peru took an 8-hour field trip.

For She’s the First Scholars in Peru, home is often very, very far from school. Some live in Andean communities four or five hours from town; others need to travel the better part of a day if they’d like to reach the nearest secondary school. To overcome these obstacles, programs like Sacred Valley Project provide a safe dormitory for the girls, giving them a home away from home and access to a high school diploma that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

For the students, the opportunity comes with…

Deepa is an STF Scholar attending Kopila Valley in Surkhet, Nepal. She was diagnosed with Lupus, a kidney disease, and so she hopes to one day become a nephrologist in order to help others with the same health issues.

In the meantime, Deepa loves to cook and to write poetry — and when the She’s the First team visited her in Nepal, she performed this beautiful poem.

“I wrote this poem because I wanted to tell the story about girls in Nepal and how they grow up here,” says Deepa. “It is about how they suppress their feelings. I…