BVN’s Girl’s Garage club, which was created in 2018, strives to create a safe space for girls to learn engineering and construction skills and establish self-confidence with the hope that more females enter the construction trades and demolish the stigma that follows girls in the male-dominated profession of engineering.
Freshman Lauren Chonko has had her eyes set on going into an engineering career ever since middle school, when she was inspired by her pre-engineering teacher from Overland Trail Middle School. This year, Chonko is taking Drafting 1, in addition to being a member of Girl’s Garage. After attending only a couple of club meetings, Chonko is excited to continue to learn about engineering through Girl’s Garage.
“You become really self-sufficient in STEM and a lot of other areas where I think that girls should become more confident because it’s such a male-dominated field,” Chonko said.
For BVN librarians and co-founders of Girl’s Garage Abby Cornelius and Kate Pommerenke, Girl’s Garage is a step forward in inspiring more girls to take engineering classes at BVN.
“One of the things that sparked Girl’s Garage was that when girls enroll in classes like Woods I, they often feel like they don’t belong because other people in the class are not the same as them,” Cornelius said.
Cornelius and Pommerenke drew their inspiration for the club from the Girl’s Garage non-profit organization that is based out of California. After coming up with the idea to run the club in the fall of 2018, they wrote a proposal to Blue Valley Educational Foundation’s “Women’s Giving Circle,” and won a $15,000 grant.
The first project that the members of Girl’s Garage undertook was designing bird-house building kits for the elementary school Girl Scouts.
“The girls learned how to use hammers, drills, paints, and sand, and the big girls were using the power tools to create the kits in addition to designing the kits,” Cornelius said.
During the after-school meeting where the members of Girl’s Garage helped the Girl Scouts construct their bird houses, Girls Garage t-shirts were also given out, which were designed and created by the members of Girl’s Garage with vinyl cutters and heat presses.
This school year, Girl’s Garage members will be building a free library to place in the BVN prairie.
“It’s going to take the rest of this year’s club days to make it because we have to build the little free library, and then we have to mount it onto a post in the prairie and bury it in cement,” Cornelius said.
While the first club day in September was spent organizing all of the supplies, members of Girl’s Garage will be using saws, hammers and drills to cut the pieces during the next club day.
Cornelius and Pommerenke already have next year’s projects planned out as well, which include constructing a bat house, a butterfly house and a bee house for the prairie, which will contribute to BVN’s goal of maximizing biodiversity in the prairie.
However, the original plan for the entire future of Girl’s Garage was that members of the club would learn engineering and construction skills, and then they would construct a tiny home for an unhoused veteran in the community.
“The idea was that girls would find a need in the community and then discover what we could build to meet that need,” Cornelius said.
Even though they haven’t set in stone all the details for the tiny house, Cornelius and Pommerkene still hope that they will be able to accomplish this goal one day.
In the meantime, members of Girl’s Garage are learning important life skills such as how to change the oil in a car and a lawnmower, as well as engineering skills such as how to solder and create AutoCADs. For Chonko, however, the self-confidence that Girl’s Garage gives her is one of the most valuable skills.
“They really stress the importance of asking other girls for help, but also having confidence as a girl and not being afraid to use your voice and step up, ” Lauren said.
