Sunday, November 20, 2011

Friday, November 18, 2011

Miss Black Ohio Speaks: Enrichment through service!

Hello everyone!

I just returned from a wonderful service experience. With a student organization at Ohio University, I travelled to an event titled Friday Night Life. This event was a dinner experience put on by a community outreach and service center in Athens, Ohio called Good Works.

This experience was very rewarding. Although I have gone to different shelters and worked through different programs to serve the community in the past, this time was different. The staff at Good Works, works hard to ensure that service with their organization is a two way street. This weekly event would not be possible without the service of not only those who volunteer but also the men, women and children who come to eat the food.

The staff at Good Works set up the Friday Night Life event so that people in the community could have not only a place to have a good meal but an opportunity to work together to prepare, eat, and CLEAN up the meal as well. The camaraderie that I experienced with not only the members of my group, but the people we served with and the Good Works staff was wonderful.

Tonight I served with about 160 individuals. Together we ate, shared our lives and worked to improve ourselves and the community we live in!

I was blessed to have this opportunity and I look forward to working with Good Works again in the future.

With love,

Kayla Hardimon
Miss Black Ohio USA

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Miss Black Ohio Speaks: My First Lesson!

Throughout this year I'm SURE that I will be learning a lot! I have only held the crown for less than two weeks, and I have already learned a lesson that will be sure to guide my entire year from this point forward.

What is this lesson I speak of?

This will be a LEARNING EXPERIENCE. Now, you may be thinking "well of course Kayla, everything new will be a learning experience," BUT.. just keep reading.

When I say that this will be a learning experience, I am not simply referring to the different lessons I will learn throughout the year, or the new experiences I will have. Just two days ago I learned something new about the importance of my platform. In an event titled "Strengthening Our Sisters" that I co-held as a member of a student organization, I learned a valuable lesson.
Throughout this year I will be traveling the state of Ohio and holding programs at my University and in my current home of Athens, Ohio to help young women begin to understand "A Woman's Worth." What I didn't realize, as I took the crown that wonderful Monday, was that while I was working hard to teach others, they would be teaching me.

The young women who came to the event had so many ideas, so many thoughts and concerns regarding female empowerment and what we must do to help women understand their worth. I was brought almost to tears to hear each of them describe in detail why they believed they were beautiful, something that most women do not believe.

What I now know is that my platform is not something that I have enough ideas about and suggestions about on my own. I need your help. This world is full of fabulous, talented, beautiful, strong and yes VALUABLE women. It is up to all of us to begin to discuss and showcase this fact, so that we can instill the idea of a woman's worth into the next generation, to create a cycle of understanding that will continue on forever.