coming up next on the form i'll be speaking with nita kellogg executive director of project bieber that's coming up next on the form hello i'm sunny and you're watching s p n form today i have sitting with me a very very powerful and special lady that i know in a twin cities her name is needed kellogg's she's the executive director of project because my mom transitioned us back to my dad as she was going through her illness or more of her mental breakdown and so came out of me as an adult realizing how many girls like actually go through the same thing that i had that i felt growing up i was still expected to  be a performing school and i was still expected to behave as a child he met the never happened in regards to my mom not being in my life after so long so from my through my middle grades my middle school years and my high school years i did of my mom was alive she was dead no one ever said that she was there but is just like not knowing so you were separated from her while all this was had by all my father raised him from the time i was twelve so i graduated at eighteen ok and so as an adult i just wanted to be able to give girls a space where they c you know how are you doing how are you doing with everything that's going on at home at school in the community you know right now we're going through a lot of the black lives let them back lives matter and so our this is our kids time for civil rights and things like medal nobody's to get taken the time to even ask them like how do they primarily it's because we want to be able to prime them for prime them for getting ready for college or whatever is going to happen after high school you know a lot of a lot of kids are not ready for for college anymore are not knowledgeable about how to get in you know you go through that phase where when i got in the spelman or i got into harvard i got into the u of minnesota but ok now how are you going to pay for running a really priming them to understand the western culture and what and how we live in the is we have coaches and six different areas so academic social emotional financial health and wellness and careers we lead with the career piece because we know that when you don't have when you can work doing what you love isn't there are working right you  the girls come in primarily telling us who they want to become and then we find a career coach pacific to that industry to coach them for that those ten months and then the group coaching is around the other one so every saturday is geared towards a certain culture it's academics is th a fitness is the first saturday black women in history is the second saturday that there is saturdays academics the fourth is sexual health and image ok and then we also have a nutritionist coach that helps us with our healthy eating so it's all about coaching the girls in certain areas so that they can have time to self discovery for one year setting goals for one year just to get them one year closer to what it's going to look like after high school ok so each of those saturdays you focus specifically on academics focusing radically on nutrition and ok ok i want to clarify that yes thank you so here's the difficult question when i say we have all these shows love and hip hop bad girls club i heard somebody say i heard some prominent black leader i remember it was on in the background but he said we are literally competing for our children's attention and so we know i know you have to know these young girls have an access to the shells because a parents are watching and they're aunts in the people around they're watching and so how do you create curriculum that competes with it i've i believe that because our curriculum is in real time and it's real talk ok that the girls are engaged because that is something different is something that hits their spirit way different than the reality shows is something that the curriculum that we create where your gifts and talents are in that area you know where you can make it personal like back then and it really is spark something inside of them and then now we can say ok so in order to get there this is what you're gonna have to do in english and this is what you're going to have to do in math because now we're like this in their everyday lives they're at school eight hours out of the day primarily all year long and so now we can say ok if you do these things then that can get you to this place and then we've got women that look like them in front of them or if they don't like them who are strong women that can show them and connect them ok and we've been around since two thousand and eight i founded it in february two thousand and eight so we've never had a girl repeat a great we all of our graduates or any girl has gone through the program has graduated ok we've only had one girl who has become pregnant in school and that was i think our second year  and actually her daughter is in first grade this year in line she's like six months ahead of her schedule in regards to reading and math ok her mother's about her she's in our third year of college you know so so to make you know those that are still there exact is this and then you can year fashion show and i was very shocked about it i attended it i was great i was really shocked at the turnout i mean the community really came out for that so what's that about what's the single about our style show we've changed from a and we swim we actually start off as a fashion show because it was about making sure the girls felt good about themselves like we gave them everything they needed for the inside and it was like look at us with low on the outside as well i mean the confidence from the inside of it and so we switched to us faster because we really wanted to focus more on the intellectual parts of our smart girls and so the style show is each a girl presenting what their career life was like with their career coaching and sharing what they got out of bed for the year and this so amazing because our girls are not just lawyers and doctors like only in the fifth grade so to be able to know that ok in the fifth grade this is what she felt this year i believe she's transitioning into a dull close instead of that but is her learning like last year she learned that ok that was what she thought she wanted but you know she wants to stay in that industry but now she wants to transition into something different so i imagine by the time she gets to about tenth grade she really is going to know what she wants to do and now we can look for scholarships that focus just on that right and we know why she's going to college and we know she won't have a carnal coming out of college right because she's kind of confused on what you exactly so so you felt it's ok that these girls are taste testing their career exactly that it's cold all that so that by the time it hits and great and we really start focusing on how are you going to pay for this next level that you're going to go into when i high school they had know what it's going to how they're going to pay for it ok we know what's going to have to be some type of higher education even if that means interning in a position where you are expired in entry level but you knew that in time for two years so they know your work they know your hands on experience right so now you're not going in at entry level  entry level earnings but you're actually going to make a couple extra dollars more because of your experience with them so you want to just set them up for that and my grandmother always taught me that what we should be doing is making sure that our kids the day after high school can make a living for believe that every girl should experience been able to take care of their household we are nurturers and so it's going to take for us to nurture ourselves our families and then our communities and so if we have some strong women taking the reins once it's time for us to sit down all over the world then i believe that the world be a better place like that i like that i think as adults we think are just as us becoming who we are as adults we forget we got to pass the knowledge on to we can so that we see that now we can sit down and put our feet up a little bit i like to have the latest step up and lucky enough to have one of the project diva participants sitting here with me today and i'm going to go ahead let you introduce yourself going oh so you naman and you and you and you great in school and m  the law that's the part the love in being here i get to figure myself out as a young lady in transition to like high school and college like i get to figure out what i want to do