ST. LOUIS — May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and one St. Louis nonprofit is making sure young women in our community get the recognition they deserve.
The Sophia Project's 13th Annual Pearling Ceremony is focused on empowering young girls and fostering mental well-being.
Dawn Price, The Sophia Project Founder and CEO, said the ceremony celebrates the growth of young women across the St. Louis area and highlights their achievements.
"It's our culminating event," she said. "For the last eight months, our kids have been working really hard on investing in themselves, working on their attitudes, working on self-regulation, and just trying to be a holistically good person. They meet with us every Friday from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. We do different programming, and at the end of the eight-month period, we celebrate them with a little black dress and a strand of pearls."
According to Price, the nonprofit is a mentoring organization that works with kids who have a history of suspensions, poor attendance or who have been pre-exposed to some kind of trauma.
"We work really hard to kind of foster well-being and to get them back on track, so that they can graduate from high school, that's our ultimate goal," she said.
Price believes it's vital for young girls to be mentored in this way, especially when they are going through adolescence.
"Things can be a little bit crazy, the decisions you make now make a difference for you later, and so it's just good, if you really want to be a great person, if you want to be exposed to a lot of things, if you really want to think about what you want to do later on in life, this is the place where we nurture that," she said.
Price said they believe in the power of transformation and that everyone should get the chance to be whatever they want to be.
"Come let us cultivate and culture that," she said.
The 13th Annual Pearling Ceremony takes place on Sunday, May 5 from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Third-Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis, MO.
You can donate to The Sophia Project here.