For Our Daughters: Helps Educate Young Women About Healthy Lifestyles

For Our Daughters is a nonprofit organization with a mission to educate young women about the tools they need to live long and healthy lives. Nutrition is one tool as is exercise and the founder of the organization is taking her message and her story to young women in schools. Mercedes Holloway founded For Our Daughters in 2012 after surviving her own bout with breast cancer. At the time she was 28 years old and came away from the experience feeling that women in her age group were not receiving as much information as they needed to build a foundation for a healthy future. One of the taglines in use by the organization is "We Can Do Better If We Know Better," which is the basis for the organizations goal to help young women reduce their risk for disease while still keeping a focus on the typical concerns of young women, including self esteem. A video on the organization's website points out that societal pressures lead young women in the direction of starving their bodies, focusing on the material and not on wellness. For Our Daughters wants to reverse that trend and help young women to be as focused on what they put into their bodies to fuel their inner health and beauty as much as what they put on their bodies. Holloway is making a visit to the Medina High School with her Zumba instructor to teach young women the value and benefit of exercise in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The organization has touched hundreds of young women at this point with their message, but they want to do better and they know they can. As mothers and daughters, sisters and granddaughters, we each have a responsibility to support each other and share the information and inspiration we have to live healthier and happier lives. Organizations like For Our Daughters can always use volunteers, so if you would like to offer your time, you can contact them via email and donate to the cause on their website to help them keep their school outreach programs viable. You can even purchase a Tshirt!. Do you know someone who suffered through a disease, taking what they learned into the community to help others? Nominate them for next week's AmericanTown's Heroes.