Banking on KC – Mary Beth Gentry of Young Women on the Move
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Kelly Scanlon:
Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Mary Beth Gentry, the executive director of Young Women on the Move. Welcome Mary Beth.
Mary Beth Gentry:
Thank you, Kelly.
Kelly Scanlon:
So glad to have you. Such an important organization for the development of young women. You are the founder of it. So tell us about the organization's core mission and how it does address the needs of young women.
Mary Beth Gentry:
So young women on the move. Actually, I founded it in 2005, so this year is our 20th anniversary. I'm very excited about that.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes, congrats. That's huge. Two decades.
Mary Beth Gentry:
Always had a special place in my heart for women and helping women to be empowered and achieve their fullest potential.
Kelly Scanlon:
What fed that? Was there something in your past? Where did that come from?
Mary Beth Gentry:
It took me a while in my own life to understand that there's factors contributing to my not feeling empowered that's not just from within. But there's sometimes systematic cultural type things and I didn't understand, but I also know that some of those perceptions have held me back and limited my thinking and my possibilities, and I certainly don't want other women to go through that.
But also in some of my work experiences, and I had spent a few years at the KU School of Medicine as an assistant dean and working on several important health initiatives with the faculty, and one of those was women's health. And I began to truly understand on a deeper level the issues that women face, but also I was very struck by the importance of women's health and that if you can keep a woman healthy, if a woman can be healthy, not just physically, but in all aspects, her children will be healthier, her husband will be healthier, the family, the community, even. Then I saw so many instances, and again in previous jobs I've had throughout my life where that was not happening and the effect on the family, the effect on the community was devastating. I just felt like since an early age that I was put here on this earth for a purpose, and that's just where my heart is.
Kelly Scanlon:
You hit on something that people actually could resonate with, especially young women or maybe their mothers encourage the participation in your programs. So talk to us a little bit more specifically about your mission.
Mary Beth Gentry:
Well, actually the mission is to unleash the power of girls to create a more vibrant, healthy, and peaceful world. And when I put that together, I was thinking, we all have the power, but what's stopping us? And so what can we do to help each girl? Not that we unleash it, but they do. And so how can we empower them to identify and believe in their own self-worth and to tap into their potential in terms of their interest, finding their purpose. But then layering on the different life skills, their habits, their attitudes, behaviors and expectations so that they not only can expand their dreams, but have plans to reach their dreams and the willpower to do it.
Kelly Scanlon:
What are some of the programs that you offer that help them do that?
Mary Beth Gentry:
So I'm very proud that we've had a long-time relationship with the Kansas City, Kansas public schools. They've welcomed us in for all of these years to work with middle school and high school girls. We do in-school programming as well as run our after-school program and our summer camps. But we mentor the young ladies. We have developed over the course of these years what I call a holistic approach. And we look at this as if there is your life balance will with your physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, and then your healthy relationships and all parts of your life, being on track academically and preparing for college and for career and learning to manage your money, becoming a self-advocate as well as advocate for your community and for a greater cause.
We really try to work with the girls on building, first of all a trusting, caring relationship before any of that happens. And then really try to meet them where they are to try to get to see where their strengths are and help them discover their strengths and interests, but also what are their goals of what are the things that they feel like in that balance wheel that are off balance because you can't work on everything at once, but pick a few things that you can work on.
And so over the course of the year and years, we try to age appropriate work with them on becoming their best selves. And we use evidence-based curricula. We use people who can come and inspire them and tell their stories, or we like to expose them to opportunities that they may not have had the ability to experience. So we'll take them on field trips and we like to introduce them to women and men in the community who can inspire them.
We're trying to give the girls, help them be more collaborative with each other and work in teams so that we're not just focusing on a leadership curriculum or presentation skills or whatever. But in this environment of where they're all working together on an issue, they're using their creativity and their thinking skills and their ability to work as a team and be accountable to each other to work on these various issues.
For the past couple of years, we've been working with MOCSA as a lead organization for our community, Wyandotte County, to reduce youth violence. And our young women have been one of the first organizations to partner, and they took it upon themselves during the summer camp to identify what are the issues that kids face. And they interviewed and used their own experiences and they came up with building a consensus that youth need safe places to gather. They need opportunities and these are things that they feel are missing, and they need more adult accountability. And our girls helped lead this and brought in other youth organizations and we're still in the process of rolling this out.
Kelly Scanlon:
I was going to ask you, you can come up with these ideas and plans, but do you actually go to the next step and execute them?
Mary Beth Gentry:
This particular project has been going on for about a year, actually two years, but now that the different youth from the other organizations, we're all building a consensus around this and the next step is for the youth to lead a campaign. I don't know what it's going to look like yet. It might be a billboard, it might be banners on the street, it might be forums, community events. Our young ladies have sponsored a health fair and a community event where families and neighbors could all get together, and now this year they have started a neighborhood cafe at our building and once a month we invite the neighbors and we invite the parents and anybody else who wants to come and the girls put on a little program and it's building a sense of community.
Kelly Scanlon:
How many young women at any one time are typically involved with your program and how long does their participation last?
Mary Beth Gentry:
We start with sixth grade, and our goal is that the girls can stay with us until they graduate, and then many come back and volunteer or we stay connected and some still need assistance. Our program right now, we have around 20 to 30 girls on a weekly basis, but we also are doing workshops in the schools and we have a federal grant to do workshops that help with healthy teen relationships. And part of that goal is to reduce teen pregnancy, which is a very big problem. Even though it's decreasing, it's still a problem. And one of the main reasons that kids, especially young women, have such a hard time rising out of poverty. And so we are starting our fifth year of this program.
Kelly Scanlon:
You've got two decades now worth of data and stories, anecdotes. What are some of the outcomes that you have seen over the years?
Mary Beth Gentry:
Well, number one is graduation. And where our girls who stay in our program, I really think it's close to a hundred percent graduation. I'll say 95%. But that's much, much better than the school district. And while they're in school, their grades improve. Attendance in school improves and their anxiety and sense of resiliency improves. The anxiety and the stress that our youth are under is manifest in many different ways. But when you interview the student population, the anxiety and stress is the number one thing. And that comes out with depression, suicide ideation, behaviors to cope with that that are not healthy.
Kelly Scanlon:
Sure, sure. You talked about mentoring just a little bit earlier. What qualities do you think are essential in a mentor for today's young women?
Mary Beth Gentry:
I think if I was one of the girls saying what they would like in a mentor is someone who would listen to them and not judge. Someone who could see their worth and be able to be there to come alongside. Not so much of "You didn't do that, right? You need to do it this way" and so forth. I think to encourage them and help them to believe that they have the answers within themselves and to then also be able to, in an optimistic, hopeful way, expose them to opportunities and to new ways of thinking and just be joyful. I think they're hungry for that.
Kelly Scanlon:
When you're involved in creating something like your students did from this last summer camp, they feel more in control then. It's like "I was a part of that." And the ownership that they feel probably goes a long way towards their self-worth. The opportunities that they get help them probably feel more in control of their lives and their futures.
Mary Beth Gentry:
Matter of fact, today they are going through some activities to think about themselves with the future in five years of what is work going to look like? And this is a direction we're focusing on this semester, is try to help them to grasp the rapid changes that are happening in our world and how are they going to compete? What are those jobs going to be? What are those skills that are going to be so needed as we go into an AI-dominated world and very tech. There will be jobs that are lost, but there's still going to be that human element that is going to need strong people skills and strong building relationships and interpreting and making good decisions. So what are they going to do to prepare for all that? Because we want them to be self-motivated. Now we can help provide the exposure to that. And I'll tell you about our plans to renovate our building for preparing them for the future of work.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes. Well, what are some of those plans?
Mary Beth Gentry:
So I'm really excited about this. During COVID, we received approval from the unified government of Wyandotte County for a grant to renovate our building. And we are getting ready this spring to start renovation of our 60-year-old building, which is the education wing and former fellowship hall because in 2017, the United Methodist Conference of Kansas donated this building to us, 10,500 square foot building, 11,000, I mean. So we've made as many changes as we with volunteer help and so forth, and now we need to get serious about it. So we are planning to put in a maker space, STEM education where youth can learn design thinking with engineering, and there'll be all kinds of activities where they will be able to learn STEM, be exposed to what STEM careers are out there. And even as the older youth, we're hoping that they can even earn some certificates in various technologies.
So we're very excited about that and we're hoping to expand our fellowship hall for more music and drama. The culinary program is already existing, but we want to improve on that. And then we have a little lot adjacent to our building that we want to tear down the old house that is condemned, and we want to turn this into an environmental classroom and our youth be able to work with landscape designers, with horticulturists. It will all involve more than just our location because we want to take our kids out and work with some engineers, work with some biologists. There's just so many opportunities for them to see, to learn all of these new technologies and industries that are coming on. But we want to give them the foundation.
This will be a supplement of what all the schools are trying to do in an atmosphere where I feel like they will continue to be given what we've always tried to do is this holistic health, becoming leaders themselves and managing well and being motivated to not only just dream, but to develop a plan and stick to it.
Kelly Scanlon:
I'm curious, when you look back over the last 20 years, have the needs and the challenges of young women changed during that time? Are you still focusing on the same things now as you did then? Are they universal or are there new things that you're seeing that you've had to address?
Mary Beth Gentry:
I think one of the biggest issues now, and I think some of our young people and especially their parents talk about it, is I sometimes feel like they've been robbed of their childhood because there is so much available to them from a social media standpoint. They don't produce content, they use it. But they're not learning, they're being overwhelmed so much that's coming at them and seeing the drama and the things that are really not healthy. But not even knowing how to research for what they really need and how to use it in a productive way. So that's definitely one of the things that we're building into our program.
And at the same time, trying to build some programs to educate parents to keep the kids safe. We've had issues with that, issues with bullying, online and so forth. There's tremendous careers using all of this wonderful technology and so forth, but it also can do damage. So how can they tell the difference? And one of the biggest things I am concerned about is as an individual myself, but especially our young people, how do they learn how to know the truth? Because they're getting so many theories, facts, things thrown at them, and they don't know if it's truth or fiction.
Kelly Scanlon:
True. I want to take you back to, you talked about the motivation that you had to help women, that it's something you have been very passionate about for many years through previous jobs and so forth. But was there something that finally said 20 years ago, I need to launch this organization?
Mary Beth Gentry:
It's probably a long time coming, but my very first job after my graduate school was becoming the chief nutritionist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. I never had been and never have since been in an environment where from the top down, from the bottom up, there was such a value placed on human dignity and equity and that all youth, regardless of income, race, anything. Deserved the best. And I saw this day in and day out with the children that came to our hospital with all kinds of different cancers. Everybody was treated with dignity. And the care that I saw was so inspiring.
We even started a program because the hospital was surrounded at that time with housing projects, and there was a lot of malnutrition and their doctors, and I was privileged to work with this doctor to start a research project, bringing those babies zero to six months of age into the hospital and getting into a study on feeding them Similac with iron formula and getting, because they were sometimes like the 10th percentile, and start gradually feeding them and getting them nourished and seeing them bouncing around in the bed and following your finger because they had the energy to follow your finger. And it was just miraculous.
And I would go into the units and help these women learn how to care for their kids. And I guess putting all that together with the children with cancer and the children that were dying of malnutrition and the head of the medical center that had come from the National Institutes of Health to help build that hospital. He said, "Malnutrition is just as catastrophic as childhood cancer," and that has stayed with me all of my life and I'm thinking, "I'm here. I need to do something about this."
And so it has evolved. I'm not just focused on nutrition now, but I do believe that our youth are our most valuable resource. And if each one of us could do our part and help these kids believe that we believe in them and provide these opportunities, our future is guaranteed to thrive. But we need all of us to help these youth.
Kelly Scanlon:
So for those of our listeners who are inspired by what you're saying, who are inspired by the work that you're doing, what are the most effective ways for them for the larger community to support young women on the move?
Mary Beth Gentry:
We're in a very challenging and exciting time with our organization, and I need help. I need help with people coming in to help with capacity building in different ways. We have a board of directors, opportunities for being on a board or being on a committee because we need people with strong business sense, with education, with many of the expertise areas that could be such an asset to us as we really try to build this new building and plan for our future, there's always a need to help us with our program to be trained.
Kelly Scanlon:
So volunteers.
Mary Beth Gentry:
Yes, volunteers. Help us put on some fundraisers, we're starting super Saturdays for events where we can bring different people in to inspire youth about careers or learn about different topics such as health or whatever. So we need help organizing, we need help with speakers. We need companies who would let us do some job shadowing or some internships for some of our older youth. I think right now we're starting our capital campaign to really build out this renovation as well as our programming. I think there's many ways to help.
Kelly Scanlon:
The thing we've talked about today, your programs, if we're on the website and your contact information to get in touch with you and the organization is there as well. What is the website.
Mary Beth Gentry:
Youngwomenonthemove.org?
Kelly Scanlon:
So Youngwomenonthemove.org, if you feel moved to reach out to Mary Beth or to the organization, just go out to the website. You can review some of the things we talked about today. You can also the organization to call and they'll help find a fit for whatever it is that you have to offer. Mary Beth, thank you so much for coming on Banking on KC today to talk about the organization, the importance of what you are doing to interact with youth in such a way that they have the best opportunities and to reach their full potential. Thank you so much.
Mary Beth Gentry:
Thank you for having me.
Joe Close:
This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Mary Beth Gentry, executive director of Young Women on the Move for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC. Mary Beth's work over the past 20 years has transformed the lives of countless young women in Kansas City. Through mentoring STEM education and leadership development programs, Mary Beth empowers girls to discover their strengths, set meaningful goals, and become leaders in their communities. Her efforts to address critical issues like career readiness, teen pregnancy and youth violence demonstrate why it's important to invest in our youth. At Country Club Bank, we believe building a stronger Kansas City starts with investing in people. Organizations like Young Women on the Move inspire us all to do our part, to create opportunities and support the next generation. Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on you Kansas City, Country Club Bank, member FDIC.