By Aaron Parsley
February 17, 2022
Source: People
Photo Source: Unsplash, Imani
The first lady met with a group of young women in Hawaii as part of the Obama Foundation’s Girls Opportunity Alliance Michelle Obama gave a group of impressive young women a big boost of confidence by meeting with them in Hawaii Tuesday to hear their stories, learn about their accomplishments and concerns in education and to share her wisdom on the value of learning and believing in yourself.
"One of the most important things you can do for yourself is to practice saying affirming messages," Obama said, offering one of many bits of advice for eight girls who met with her at an intimate gathering at the Mānoa Heritage Center. "You can't control what the world says to you, but you can control what you say to yourself. Practice letting in good messages about yourself. Invite good people into your circle." PEOPLE spoke with Allena Villanueva, 17, about the experience. "Mrs. Obama has been my idol for so many years. I read her book, Becoming, right when it came out, and she has always just been an inspiration to me," Villanueva, a high school senior at Punahou School in Honolulu, said in a phone interview.
The event was organized by the Obama Foundation's Girls Opportunity Alliance (GOA), whose mission is to empower adolescent girls around the world. "I thought it was so important to start a network for girls like you around the world so that they know they aren't alone," Obama, 58, told eight young women who were selected as participants. GOA's focus is on education, which Executive Director Tiffany Drake called the "gateway." "You can help a girl become whatever her dreams are, but it doesn't just help the girl," she told PEOPLE in an interview after the event. "If she's educated, she can then turn around and help her family and her community and her country."
Drake said GOA first connected with grassroots organizations in Hawaii about a year ago to learn about their missions and to identify middle and high school girls for the event. Villanueva — who created an all-girls robotics team in eighth grade that is now a two-time state champion — was selected in part because of her internship with Purple Mai'a Foundation, whose mission to "empower the next generation of culturally-grounded, community-serving technology makers and problem solvers" lines up nicely with GOA. When she came face to face with Obama, Villanueva said she was "super nervous." But only at first. "They were very starstruck for a second," Drake said of Villanueva and the other girls in the group, adding that Obama cracks a joke or two to put young people at ease and make them feel like they are part of her family.
"She was calling herself Auntie Michelle, which is a very common term here," Drake said. "She wanted them to feel like [she can be] a second mother." Before long, Drake said, "These girls were laughing. They were joking with her. They were telling her stories. They had their shoulders held high."
The meeting had been planned for an hour but went over by 40 minutes before the first lady and the students strolled the grounds of the cultural center.
"She told them that we could talk as long as they wanted, nothing was off the table," Drake said. "They could ask anything. She was an open book and just gave them so much sound advice." The girls were invited to ask the first lady a question, and the topics ranged from how to handle negative thoughts to taking on bullies to surviving the college-application process.
Asked how she deals with stress, Obama "mentioned knitting helps her to do something physically, and then get out of that mental space that may be a negative at that moment," Villanueva said. "That really stuck to heart with me." Villanueva also got some advice on how to deal during the long wait to hear back from an impressive list of universities considering her application.
"What if I don't make it into these really great Ivy League schools? How do I still prove or show that I'm worth it to the naysayers of the world that I'm more than what college I go to or what my grades are?" Villanueva told PEOPLE about her current, college-related anxieties. "She really emphasized in her answer that the college that you go to doesn't matter. It's more your personality and your hard work, and your honesty and integrity," Villanueva said. "She said like, for herself when she's looking at staff, she doesn't look at the school. It's more their qualities. And that made me feel a lot better."
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