Global Village School Gives Girls a Chance
Written by Jan Jaben-Eilon Thursday, June 23 2011
Snapshot: Grace M. Hawkins
Grace M. Hawkins is executive director of metropolitan Atlanta’s The Global Village School (GVS) for young female refugees from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Sudan, and Congo.
These girls, ages 12 to 20, all have landed in Atlanta from various war-torn countries. Many come from countries where females are held in low regard and are not provided even the most basic rights or education. All of these girls are victims of the violence of war. Some have seen close family members brutally killed and have difficult memories to contend with, along with the adjustment to life in a very different society.
If they were to enter the public school system – unable to speak English and with limited educational experience – they would be lost in the system and poised either for a life of unemployment or minimum-wage jobs.
The curriculum at The Global Village School is highly individualized and taught by experienced faculty. Hawkins, who has tutored refugee students since moving to Atlanta from Seattle in 2006, has a background in publishing management and internet marketing and communications.
She traveled widely in Asia and Africa for 10 years before returning to the United States in 1981.
Womenetics: Did you start this school? If so, why and how?
Grace Hawkins: The school is part of a big dream, the vision of a small group of activists interested in the issues of refugee education. I entered the picture as a new resident of Atlanta, looking for a way to pay back some measure of the help I had from strangers in my travels around the world.
I met the founders of a charter elementary school with a 50-50 population of local kids and refugees, and I just started saying, "Sure, I'll help with that." That this school was desperately needed in Clarkston (sometimes called “Clarkistan") (Atlanta suburb) grew out of the observation that while young kids hit the ground running and catch up in English pretty quickly, the story is very different for adolescents.
Their life experiences are, by their teenage nature, so intense, and when those experiences have included running from war, enslavement, and multiple family losses, school in a new language is tough. A grant was written, and in an extraordinary stroke of forward thinking, The Atlanta Women's Foundation awarded a seed grant for a girls' school, which enabled us to start The Global Village School in 2008.
Womenetics: How do you find the girls to enroll in your school?
Hawkins: Our girls come to us from word of mouth in the refugee communities, from case worker recommendations among the many refugee resettlement agencies that are tasked with easing refugee families into American life, and from local school systems.
Womenetics: How many volunteers work at the school? Are most of your teachers volunteers?
Hawkins: I got an email early this year from a woman who described her qualifications to be a tutor as "a Ph.D. in English with a minor in Women's Studies and 10 years in Tanzania." We have retired chemistry professors and former heads of departments of linguistics. We have high school students who want to jump in and do something cool on their semester break.
Almost daily, another new volunteer arrives having been told about the school by a friend; they can't wait to share the love. We have more than 150 active volunteers who tutor and work on teams. This might be an hour a week or it might be teaching piano during lunch hour Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday to three Burmese girls starved for music. And while our board is, of course, a volunteer organization, our teachers are all paid with the exception of one English teacher who shares the English position with a paid teacher. Teacher salaries are our main expense.
One more thing about "teachers:" Our founding lead teacher, Yang Li, taught us that we are all teachers and we are all learners. This means we know the girls of GVS have as much to teach us as we have to teach them, and we all laugh at our mistakes.
Womenetics: These young women come from a variety of backgrounds and a broad age range. How do they get along?
Hawkins: The school began with a big problem: Sunni and Shi'a, Christian and Buddhist, 11 languages, and even some old rivalries imported from the refugee camps where crowded conditions foster trouble.
Teachers and staff were mostly from middle class America, though everyone had some experience with refugee populations and we all received ground level trauma training to recognize signs of stressors such as PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). We started with these problems and the determination to create a real sense of a community where every voice is respected and heard. From that first full year (2009-2010) to today, the school's 30 to 35 girls are friends across languages, cultures, and religions. If only we could transfer this to the wider world.
Womenetics: What is your biggest challenge as executive director?
Hawkins: Funding is my biggest challenge. We have to raise every penny of the $10,000 it takes to educate each girl. It's a bargain by today's cost-per-student standards, but we do not charge any tuition or fees, which our students are too poor to pay.
I have no other challenges, only the many joys of working with amazing staff, dedicated volunteers, and a brilliant board of visionary leaders who are entirely supportive of my work as executive director.
Womenetics: Your background is in publishing management, internet marketing and communications. How did that prepare you for your work with The Global Village School?
Hawkins: Running a business, which I did for 25 years, was good grounding for being part of a small nonprofit organization. You have to be able to pull out splinters, fix the copier, pay the bills, juggle schedules, and solve hundreds of problems every day. My publishing background fit right in with handling the website and our print and digital newsletters. We are not where we want to be with social media, but we are moving in the right direction. The wide spectrum of work I did before helped me jump in from the beginning and handle a lot of different tasks.
Womenetics: Are there similar types of schools in other cities in the United States?
Hawkins: Recently two GVS girls moved out of state, one to Minnesota and one to Wisconsin. They both asked, "Is there a GVS there?" At our recent board retreat we talked about that in terms of our long-range thinking. Why shouldn't there be a GVS everywhere that there are concentrations of teenage girls who will otherwise sink without a trace in school systems, which are just not up to the task of addressing their needs?
These girls are social lynchpins who could tie their non-English speaking parents to their communities, help their younger siblings adapt, and fulfill their own dreams of a real American education. But they absolutely need the intensive education we are giving them.
Womenetics: What spurred you to travel throughout Asia and Africa after college?
Hawkins: When I was very, very young I saw a black-and-white television program about India. Later in school and college I studied sociology, anthropology, several languages, and art history. I set off to see the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, and I succeeded. I met my first husband, a linguist, in India, and we later traveled while he did research in Africa and in Asia, bringing along two babies and 40 cloth diapers.
I just wanted to see the world, and I was lucky enough to set off when I was one year out of college and had no car payments, mortgages, or credit cards – and very little money. I learned that people all over the world are just the same as me, a lesson which has proven very valuable since.
Womenetics: Do you think that experience had a role to play in your joining this school?
Hawkins: Yes, definitely. When I was working in my own business I traveled a lot and that schedule kept me from volunteering in any regular way, though I have been a peace activist and death penalty opponent all my life. Once my husband and I moved to Georgia my schedule changed, and I was freer to volunteer. Better late than never.
Womenetics: When you were a child, were you interested in people from other cultures?
Hawkins: I grew up in Massachusetts in the beautiful western part of the state. The only person of any color I remember from my childhood was Mrs. Brown, the cafeteria manager in my elementary school.
In college, in Vermont, the student population was hardly diverse back in the late ‘60s. I can only imagine that my interest in what was a largely unknown part of the planet's peoples and cultures came from books and art. The sculptural complex of Khajuraho in India, gorgeous Benin bronzes, Sung dynasty Chinese painting: I wanted to see all these things somehow. I haven't succeeded yet, but the game is not over either.
Womenetics: When you aren’t raising money or running this school, what do you do for fun?
Hawkins: I have a big garden full of many different trees, perennials, and water features. When I hit the garage door opener at the end of the day, my beautiful chickens rush up to the back gate, waiting for their sunflower kernel treats and proud of the day's egg count. You can hardly imagine how calming they are and what a magical gift their eggs feel like.
Best of all are the evenings when I have my 2-year-old grandson with me. Then he collects the eggs, counting them incorrectly but carefully. His big brother helps, too. I am married and have a daughter and son-in-law. We left the Pacific Northwest, the most beautiful place in the world to me, in order to join up with my daughter's little family, and it was the best idea of the new century.
Jan Jaben-Eilon was a founding staff writer of the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Since then, she has been the international editor of Advertising Age magazine and has written for such publications as The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Washington Journalism Review, and Consumer Reports. She is the author of soon-to-be-published (There is) Life After Cancer. Jan and her husband have homes in Atlanta and Jerusalem.
