Throughout this past March, our school celebrated Women’s History Month. Many clubs, such as Me to We, took the initiative to empower the women around our school and educate members of our school about women’s history. 

Throughout Women’s History Month, Me to We gave students of Metea the opportunity to learn about sixteen influential women by hosting a March Madness-style bracket event in which students were able to vote for the influential women they wanted to learn more about. The sixteen women included Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Jacinda Arden, the Queen of England, Qui Jin, Marie Curie, Harriet Tubman, Marsha Johnson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift, Jen Rowe, Kristan Ziman, Angie Lee, and Lauren Underwood.

Initially, a slide with information about each woman was featured on Me to We’s “Women’s History Month Slides,” and based on that information, students were able to vote for who they wanted to learn more about by using brackets. This continued throughout the month, and the winners of each bracket had a new slide with their information added to the slideshow. 

The finalists were Malala Yousafzai, who is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning advocate for female education, and Angie Lee, who founded Angie’s Hope, which is an organization that has spread awareness and has raised over $200,000 for the cure for Angie’s neuromuscular disease, spinal muscular atrophy. Both of the finalists were women with amazing accomplishments, and students voted on the final winner of the brackets, was Angie Lee.

After being voted as the woman who the students of Metea wanted to learn the most about, Lee was excited to be interviewed to tell the students of Metea about her organization and its mission.

“Angie’s Hope raises funds and awareness for a cure for Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), a genetic neuromuscular disease,” Lee said. “I think that raising awareness for the cause is just as important, if not more important than raising money for it, and I am so thankful for the Metea community, which was able to help raise so much money for SMA…Since 2007, we have raised over $260,000 towards a cure [for SMA]. The FDA has now approved 3 treatments for SMA, which is super exciting and hopeful.”