There she was, a beautiful baby girl with cafe au lait skin, a glossy crown of curls and piercing brown eyes that reflected curiosity about the world around her. I wasn’t a first-time mother when Nia was born, but her arrival sparked a larger awareness of the issues awaiting today’s kids, particularly those with the unique challenges of being both female and of color.
The future, according to The Center for American Progress, is a precarious one: While women of color will make up 53 percent of the female population by 2050, the collective gains in political and economic clout haven’t been equally dispersed. The disparities in education and training opportunities not only threaten the livelihoods of Asians, Hispanics, African-Americans and other biracial groups, they also put families and communities at risk by lessening the nation’s wealth and purchasing power.
It’s statistics like these that moved native Texan, business woman and philanthropist Gail Warrior, to initiate change.
The founder of Warrior Group, one of the nation’s largest woman- and minority-owned construction firms, also originated the Heart of a Warrior Charitable Foundation, which funds the Young Warrior Summer Learning Program that benefits children of under-served area communities. The educational curriculum partners with camps free of charge from Dallas’ St. Phillips School and Community Center, Hamilton Park’s Willie B. Johnson and downtown’s Juanita J. Craft Recreational Center.
“My older sister, younger brother and I were very fortunate to have the parents that we did because they always talked about learning and the importance of education and learning,” said Warrior recently by phone. “During the summer, we were always involved in some sort of learning activity, so I wanted to create something education-related that would give back to the community in our parents’ memory.
What I learned after doing some research was that all children, no matter what their socioeconomic background is, unless their actively engaged in some type of learning, they lose knowledge, so when they return to school, the teachers usually spend up to four weeks re-training kids with the knowledge that they’ve lost over those summer months.”
The Young Warrior approach, which uses the acclaimed STEM-based curriculum of science, technology, engineering and math, allows for multiple opportunities of hands-on interaction and engagement. Every full session ends with a graduation ceremony at a college campus that includes a tour, a processional to the graduation hymn, a guest speaker, a certificate of completion and a group lunch.
“There is classroom-based learning and experience-based learning,” Warrior says.”One field trip was to the La Cordon Bleu cooking school, where students made their own lunches, and another involved students visiting the robotics lab at the University of Texas at Dallas. One of our groups went all the way to Lockheed Martin, where they went on a tour around the plant and learned how airplanes were put together.”
Since HOAW is a non-profit group, fundraising is provided by grants, monies by private donors and a yearly Casino Night, which will take place at Altitude in the W Dallas Victory Hotel on Saturday. As fun as raffle tickets, table games and Vegas-themed menus can be, Warrior finds the broadened horizons that her organization provides to be just as rewarding.
“We all have a responsibility to put kids on the path for building leadership skills, self-worth and value. It may just be eight weeks over the summer, but you never know what one thing, even done casually, could make a life-changing impact for that one child.”
