Everyone and their mother here at QU saw that it was Gamma Phi Beta’s first annual “Building Strong Girl’s Day” last week. Some might have felt heckled outside by the quad, were confused by their loud singing and dancing, and saw their social media filled with pictures of the girls holding positive adjectives, but clearly this is something the girls of this sorority are passionate about.

Their philanthropy is called Building Strong Girls, and they work with Girls on the Run, an organization dedicated to teaching young girls how to overcome adversity and to have confidence in one’s self.

Why is this important?

This is a proactive way to get girls, or honestly anyone in general, to learn their self-worth early in life, something most girls wish they could’ve learned before high school.

Did you know that 13 percent of girls ages 9 to 14 are already developing eating disorders? That’s before they even hit puberty, which is when a girl’s self-esteem really begins to plummet. And that’s just the diagnosed instances. People forget that skipping meals is not healthy. Crash diets are not healthy. Working out multiple times a day unless under the guidance of a trainer and dietician is not healthy. Looking at yourself in the mirror with disgust or with the thoughts of never being good enough, pretty enough or thin enough are not healthy.People forget how much their words make an impact on others. How we treat people and the values we instill in our youth shape them into who they become later on in life. Tearing people down, making them feel inadequate, and inadvertently teaching people that they are not good enough, worthy enough, or do not fit that “standards of society” is setting future generations up for failure.

Maybe if I would’ve grown up with more confidence I would not have restricted my diet to under 1,000 calories per day in addition to double workouts every day back when I was a sophomore in high school.

Maybe if your best friend had a good support system behind her to make her feel as if she was enough, she wouldn’t have felt the need to self-harm. She would have people to confide in rather than mutilating her body to get these negative feelings out. Maybe she wouldn’t have needed to hide or lie about these cuts in addition to those insecurities.

Maybe that girl who went home every night and cried to her mom wouldn’t have had to if she learned sooner that she was good enough.

If Tyler Clementi wasn’t have bullied so harshly and felt so degraded by his peers in college and felt that there was no way out, he would not have committed suicide.

The words we say do matter, and instead of building people up to succeed and be happy, society rips people apart and sets people up to be miserable, self-conscious and feel as if we aren’t worthy.

We need to learn to “put love on top” and learn that “we ain’t picture perfect but we [have to] work the pictures still.”

This is precisely why we not only need to “Build Strong Girls” but also build strong people in general. (This is also why I joined the Gamma Phi Beta Sorority.)