Our Story

That is an excerpt from an email sent from Ms. Orret to 16 girls on September 24, 2020. Those girls made up about only 20% of Ms. Orret's computer science classes.

Seven of those girls responded.

"I really like this idea because this is one of the times where I strongly feel like I am a black sheep and most of my classmates won't take me seriously and things like that. I usually am able to move past feeling like this but its really hitting me hard for some reason this time. I was actually thinking about how there are very few women in the web dev classes during class today."

"This sounds like a great idea! I'm still very inexperienced in this field, but it's somthing that i've really wanted to get into for a while."

"I think it's a good idea and will help other girls find interests in things like coding and other activities/hobbies that are usually thought to be "male-oriented".

Over Cisco Webex, the idea of a newsletter was born. Just a couple weeks later, we had assigned articles and cover art. We had voted on a layout and name. We had discussed themes, colors, events. We had become the 28% WIS newsletter team. On November 1, 2020, we put out our first newsletter. We had 9 subscribers.

It's been three years since that first newsletter came out. Today we have two teams of girls at two high schools, spanning across all four grades. We have layout designers, writers, artists, and social media managers. We send the newsletter to over 150 subscribers. We've published dozens of issues.

This year we applied for the GirlsBuild grant, proposing to expand our reach further into our district and community. Through this grant, a group of girls at the neighboring school, John Muir High School, joined the PHS team to create a second chapter of the newsletter! These two teams have been working together to publish the monthly newsletter, as well as reach our respective campuses. Additionally through the grant, the PHS team was also able to expand the annual winter festival to be a community event, rather than open just to PHS students. We brought together a number of women-owned business, the PHS orchestra, and a city council member to put on a market for the community at large.

After doing small campus-specific events the year before, we wanted to be able to expand our reach into our larger community. But having the events at school limited the ability for community members to come join. For the winter festival in particular, this meant that we had to find a new venue, as well as work with local businesses to sponsor and attend the event.

After doing small campus-specific events the year before, we wanted to be able to expand our reach into our larger community. But having the events at school limited the ability for community members to come join. For the winter festival in particular, this meant that we had to find a new venue, as well as work with local businesses to sponsor and attend the event. We outlined the project needs in the Project Planner found here and our final budget can be found here.

This event brought together our community, supported local businesses, and helped us increase our subscriber count by more than 50! Over 100 community members attended our event, including our local councilman! He subscribed and made a promise to push out the newsletter in his own social media. We also were able to raise $600 from a vintage photobooth we built for the festival. We plan to use the photobooth in future events as well.

Through this grant and these projects, we were able to lay a lot of groundwork in our larger community and expand our reach. We hope in the next years to continue to do so, organizing more community events and hopefully supporting chapters at other campuses.

Check out our impact report on slide 40, as well as the other 2023-2024 Girls Build projects!