Michelle Obama has always been my girl. The epitome of the trifecta--beautiful, powerful, and intelligent. She always looks stunning. When she moves, she does it with strength, and confidence, and mesmerizing elegance. She speaks with the same equanimity and poise that her husband is admired for. Each sentence is concise, well-worded, and impactful. If you haven't seen her commencement speech at the City College of New York, you need to. Michelle restores my faith in female leaders, representing herself as a true, admirable role model in this world of Kardashian lovers.
Sure, first ladies have been notoriously beautiful and classy in the past. I'm not forgetting about you, Jackie! However, Michelle has set herself apart, and has set a high bar for future FLOTUS, through her implementation of action. She does not simply promote a cause. She dedicates her life and her resources to it, she uses her position of power to influence, she physically creates movement. Remember her cause against childhood obesity? Let me recap: childhood obesity has tripled its numbers in the past three decades, so it too is an epidemic that has become intertwined with society. Let's Move, Michelle's program, activated upgraded health and fitness standards across the board--schools, hospitals, museums, grocery stores--and infiltrated the system. She is now tackling the issues surrounding women's education with this same vigor, and her platform is as powerful as ever. Since launching her project Let Girls Learn, she isn't simply donating money or building schools--she is changing the way people across the world view women's education. She is partnering with the Peace Corps, implementing permanent missionaries across the globe, going far below the surface. She wants not to build up schools (only dealing with "on-the-ground issues," as she calls them), but to actually break down the cultural stereotypes and social barriers that are keeping girls out of them. It is a process that will take years, many years longer than her lifetime, as she knows, but she is on a mission to get it started. Her efforts are admirable.
She has set up conferences throughout poverty and war-stricken countries, ones lacking public education, and fostered a real sense of what these girls are missing. She sees the way they admire their powerful female leaders, the oppression that they are facing, and the potential that they hold. She has mapped out both the immediate and long term effects of educating women globally--from simply bringing more money into their household to effectively lowered rates of HIV and AIDS. As she states in a recent interview with InStyle magazine, "girls are going to move our country and our world to a place where there's more peace, more prosperity, more possibility, because women raise the next generations again and again and again". Do you see the difference? She is working to create a future. She doesn't want to change the world now, she wants to change the world forever.
All the while, Michelle uses social media in an influential, connective way. The way social media was created to be used. She relates with millennials through Snapchat, live-streaming her conferences across the globe, inviting everyone to join the conversation. She's not using Instagram to show off her outfit or boast about her newest Range Rover, she's using it to share an idea and initiate change. I am drawn to her insightfulness and obsessed with her dedication to making a change. Seriously, watch her commencement speech. Spoken like a true First Lady. I stand in admiration as she embarks on her newest journey to educate the 62 million girls across the world who are not in school. Here she goes again, improving our world. Let Girls Learn!
