Women | Tyra Garlington

Transformation is more than a word with Millie Harris

Posted on July 15, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

Author Richard Kearney says in his book On Stories “Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.” Isak Dinesen says, “To be a person is to have a story to tell. —” Author David Denborough, Ph.D., writes “Who we are and what we do are influenced by the stories that we tell ourselves…There are many different events in our lives, but only some of them get formed into the storylines of our identities. Whatever storyline we have about our lives……
Read More »

A courageous conversation about human trafficking with Bill Woolf

Posted on July 14, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

Bill Woolf had been a police officer for ten years and was a detective with Fairfax County Police Community Resources Division, tasked with investigating all forms of human trafficking in Fairfax County. He was named 2012 Gang Investigator of the Year by the Virginia Gang Investigator’s Association and received the Virginia Attorney General’s Award for Excellence. Recipient of the 2012 Milton Thrasher Award for Superior Excellence in Gang Prevention, he actively sought to form and foster collaborative relationships with agencies and service providers outside of his department in an effort to comprehensively combat the issue of human trafficking. Joins us in a courageous……
Read More »

Surviving human trafficking with Susan Young

Posted on July 14, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

Danielle Douglas was 17 years old, a freshman at Northeastern University, when she met the trafficker who forced her into two years of sex slavery. Her mother Jamie spoke with UNICEF USA about the factors that made her daughter vulnerable — and what parents need to know about trafficking in the United States. Jamie Chesman: We definitely had some mother-daughter angst. She didn’t always give me a lot of information about her life or interests. I think that a lot of our daughters feel like they’re ready before they’re ready — she definitely felt that way. We dropped her off, carloads full of things from Bed……
Read More »

Shout Out to All the “Mean Moms”! Woot Woot!!!

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

“Are you a Mean Mom? Do you require specifics and details? Do you trust but verify? Do you watch over your child in a way that makes sure wherever they go they’re safe? Do you resist changing your position at a moment’s notice? Do you hold to your beliefs? Have your kids recently called you a Mean Mom? Can I just say that parenting (mothering) is not for the faint of heart? There’s no time to be all in your feelings. The day has started stuff has to be done. People have to be places, little noses have to be……
Read More »

It’s okay to be selfish: HAPPY EARLY MOTHER’S DAY!

Posted on May 7, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

“We spend so much of our time taking care of others and focusing on all the things that need to get done. In the midst of it all, it’s easy to forget about ourselves or to let self-care tumble to the bottom of our priority list. It’s easy to convince ourselves that it’s okay to ignore our own needs or “wait until later” (which hardly ever happens). And it’s all too easy to go without the time, care, and compassion that we need. You know how that turns out. One day we realize that not only are we busy, but……
Read More »

Warning: “Don’t Touch the Blossoms!”

Posted on April 2, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

“The effort to bring cherry blossom trees to Washington, D.C., preceded the official planting by several decades. In 1885, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore returned from her first trip to Japan and approached the U.S. Army Superintendent of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds with the idea of planting cherry trees along the reclaimed waterfront of the Potomac River. Scidmore, who would go on to become the first female board member of the National Geographic Society, was rebuffed, though she would continue proposing the idea to every Superintendent for the next 24 years. Several cherry trees were brought to the region by individuals in this period, including one that was the location of a……
Read More »

It’s Women’s History Month: Celebrate “Hidden Figure” and human computer, Katherine Johnson

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

“Over a decade before Neil Armstrong made “one small step for man,” Katherine Johnson was making giant leaps for all women. Despite the fact that Johnson was the “human computer” behind the calculations that were critical to launching the first American in space, sending the first American man to orbit the Earth, and landing the first human on the moon, her place in history remained largely unrecognized—until now. In 1953 she began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)’s West Area Computing unit, a group of African American women who manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers. The women, known……
Read More »

It’s Women’s History Month: She could accept the injustice, or she could rewrite the law

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

“Every six months, the routine was the same for 21-year-old Harvard student Amanda Nguyen. She would walk through the doors of her local rape crisis center in Massachusetts and plead to administrators: Do not destroy my rape kit. With the massive backlog of rape kits in the U.S., it was nearly impossible in some states to ensure that a kit was tested, let alone even track down its location. New York City alone reportedly has an estimated 17,000 untested rape kits. Under Massachusetts law, Nguyen had to locate her own rape kit and file an extension to preserve the evidence in……
Read More »

It’s Women’s History Month: Celebrate Mary Herrera, an Iraq Shero.

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

“Mary Jessie Herrera is from Somerton, a little town near Yuma, Arizona, not far from the Mexican border. A fourth-generation American, Mary always wanted to go into the military. Mary became a sergeant in the Military Police. She looks as if she weighs maybe 100 pounds dripping wet but does not see herself as petite. “I think of myself as a big person,” she said. “I never thought of myself as a female or Hispanic in the military; I was a soldier, period. I carried my own weight. There was nothing girly about me in the military. I don’t like labels.……
Read More »

Saluting those in black history about whom we may say, “Who?”

Posted on February 12, 2019 by Tyra Garlington • 0 Comments

“Oh, Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthin’ babies”, Gone with the Wind, 1939. Thelma McQueen attended public school in Augusta, Georgia and graduated from high school in Long Island, New York. She studied dance with Katherine Dunham, Geoffrey Holder, and Janet Collins. She danced with the Venezuela Jones Negro Youth Group. The “Butterfly” stage name, which does describe her constantly moving arms, actually derives from dancing the “Butterfly Ballet” in a 1935 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Her stage debut was in “Brown Sugar,” directed by George Abbott for whom she did several other stage shows. In 1939 she appeared as the……
Read More »