Please Pass the Cookies

Sep 2, 2011 by Gretchen Seefried

Remember how simple friendships were when you were  little?  At two and three, kids have little guile, so figuring out who your friends were was pretty easy.  You’d just say, ” I like you, wanna play?” and that was it!  Things got trickier when grade school started. Those years of girl games “if you like her, then we don’t like you” were a challenge. Thank goodness that need to compete began to fade a bit after high school.

As an adult, my girl friendships trump just about everything.  I love the family I created, and the family I came from…but my friends are the family I choose; they are the ones who truly embrace my essence.  Perhaps it is the universal experience of being a female that drives this bond women have.  That, and the quality of empathy, which is more developed in most of us than it is in most men. Our willingness to bare our souls, share our sorrows, admit our fears, AND to receive these gifts from each other, mean we open ourselves up to the simple joy of being understood.

Yesterday, I met with the team from Girl Scouts of Colorado to talk about an epic project that together we’ll be bringing to Denver this fall. The Colorado Clothesline Project: Expressions Of Healing and Hope, will be an opportunity for women of all ages to work together with girls to educate each other and the larger community about the impact of violence and how to break the cycle.

The original Clothesline Project, brainchild of visual artist Rachel Carey-Harpe, consisted of 31 shirts displayed on a village green in Hyannis, Massachusetts, as part of an annual “Take Back the Night ” rally. The catalyst had been these two statistics released during the summer of 1990:

58,000 soldiers died during the Vietnam war; 51,000 women died at the hands of an intimate partner during that same period of time. In response, a coalition of women’s groups had gathered to come up with a way to educate, break the silence, and bear witness to the issue of violence against women.

This outreach created an overwhelming national response and brought the Clothesline Project from a single, local, grassroots effort into an intense national campaign. Today there are over 50,000 shirts and 500 projects around the world. The Clothesline Project honors women survivors as well as victims of intimate violence. Such a simple, yet forceful concept: let each woman tell her story in her own unique way, using words or artwork to decorate her shirt, then hanging it on the clothesline. The result is an educational tool for those who come to view the Clothesline, a healing tool for those who were affected by violence, and a ray of hope for those who are still suffering in silence by assuring them that they are not alone.

Our vision at MidChix & MadHens is Safe Homes and Communities for Girls and Women. To accomplish this, our mission is to empower women through education and connection.  Through our partnership for The Colorado Clothesline Project, we aim to empower girls, as well as women, by showing them how together we can change the hurt that marred the past into hope for a safer future through the strength of our universal sisterhood.

If you would like to make a shirt for the project, either on your own, or during an upcoming workshop with Girl Scouts, please email me at .

Even if you don’t reside in Colorado, we welcome you to join our project, or you can look for one in your own area here.

I couldn’t be more excited about this opportunity, and not just because of my yen for Thin Mints.

Sending Prayers and Thoughts to all of our Friends and Families out East,

Gretchen