MI Hija’s Shining Star Program

Michigan Health Initiative & Justice Assistance (MI Hija) is a nonprofit organization for women and girls.  MI Hija was created as an arts and education organization to promote and empower female artistic endeavors and create sisterhoods.

What we as founders know is that there is a lack of visibility for female artistic entrepreneurs and female lead talent which is perpetuated by most industries including the music industry and surprisingly even the culinary industry.  Our organization was created to spotlight women that we would normally not see in leadership roles spotlighted.  

MI Hija has three levels of programming:

1.       Girls and Youth

2.       Women

3.       LGBT Women

Under our Girls and Youth platforms, we have organized The Shining Star Program which is scheduled to launch Fall of 2019.

The Shining Star Program is a quarterly informational with female panelists. Each panelist comes from either an artistic or a nontraditional career path and will speak candidly with attendees about how they arrived at their chosen field.  Their talking points will include the educational elements for their chosen field, the challenges of being a female in their field and how they overcame those challenges and the financial compensation and financial obligations incurred after completing their education.

The MI Hija team is ready for action.  We have our speakers in place and we have already begun creating our website, defining our brand and securing our venue spaces. The directorship has years of experience with working with vendors, and contractors who will assist with things like web development and literature creation. 

We have begun nurturing our relationships with school officials, teachers and board members who will also serve as our support team in spreading the word about our project.   Our actual plan of action is to:

1.       Send our website content to the web developer who has the ability to launch our site in less than 30 days.

2.       Contact our attorney assistant who will walk our board treasurer and secretary through the 501c3 application process.

3.       Schedule and promote our first “Shining Star Event”.

4.       Schedule and promote “Shining Star II”.

Our goal is to help young ladies by providing them the blueprint for their career success and by providing encouragement and support needed with making their decisions.  How many people do you know that attended college and after a couple of years return home? They are home with mounds of student loan debt, no degree, and struggle to find suitable employment.  We hear many stories like this in our community. 

There are some young ladies with no aspiration of going to college and some that don’t see college as a possibility.  We want to show young ladies that they have options even when it looks like there are none.  One of MI Hija’s keynote speakers was a high school dropout who is now a college professor and consultant with the NBA, WNBA and the NFL.  We want to show young ladies that they can achieve their dreams even if it is a dream deferred.

We also know that there are careers that don’t require college education; we want to show young ladies the road to take on those careers as well.  Did you ever dream that what you do in your free time; Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and the like; could turn into an actual paid position?  We relic in the wonderment of showing young ladies how to turn the platforms they love into a career path.