Positive Interaction on the Menu at W.O.W.! Meeting

Thursday was Holiday Potluck night for the 33 students in Women on the Way (or W.O.W.!), a youth program held at the building designed to promote positive female interaction.

“It’s to bring students together from all different grades where they forget their cell phones, boyfriends, teachers and parents,” said program director Brita Gotberg of the Granby Youth Services Bureau.

W.O.W.!’s meetings, held every Thursday during the school year for the last seven years, range between the serious - such as a Cross-the-Line theme on Dec. 1 that involved deep discussions on heavy topics like racism - to the lighthearted, like late-October’s Game Night.

Sitting in a big circle last night, each of the girls, in keeping with that meeting’s theme, announced a dish she brought that is traditionally served during one of her family’s holidays.

Julia Moon, a 2005 GMHS graduate and W.O.W.! alum who now volunteers for the group, explained why only one bag of chips made its way to the table to accompany the cream cheese/bean dip her family serves during the Super Bowl (not an official holiday, but it may as well be).

“I left one of the bags at the supermarket,” Moon said as the rest of the girls in the room broke out in laughter. “It’s still at Geissler’s.”

Other dishes included kielbasa, mashed potatoes, a ton of brownies and rice pudding and, in keeping with my desire to be a hard-hitting journalist, made myself a guinea pig (or just pig, really) and sampled everything.

But while food was the order of discussion for the evening, there was a broader, more important theme at play.

High school, for all of its positives, isn’t always the best place for a teenager to let her guard down. W.O.W.! provides the platform where many of the girls go for positive group interaction without them having to worry about negative consequences of sharing too much, or, perhaps worse, not at all.

“It’s an open area where you can share anything you are feeling,” sophomore Ali Ricci said in between bites of food on her plate. “You get to know people and their opinions.”

“It’s stress relief,” Abby Orsz added.

“This is a fun place where you can let everything go,” Molly Freeman said.

The group also serves as a place where positive role models - such as female business owners - are brought in to discuss what they do.

“It was just a cool way to see how different things go,” Moon said of her experience with the group years ago. “I learned a lot about careers.”

Some things have changed since 2005, as the group has tripled in size and is now much more diverse, which opens doors for many of the girls.

“You can talk as if nothing is in the way,” senior Kellie Jusko said. “You leave your bags at the door and start over as a new person.”