About

Chara McGill is known as the “Girl Power Strategist.” She is a curriculum developer, program director, and consultant for youth leadership programming. She is also an inspirational teacher and motivational speaker and is no stranger to female empowerment. In 2018, while working in management at the world’s largest ‘girl-led’ leadership organization, GirlScouts, Chara became inspired to expand her brand to help youth with body image issues.

Her passion for helping teens started at a young age. At just 16 years old, she established a teen pregnancy prevention program that garnered the attention of Ralph Lauren’s “Polo” baby clothing line. During this time, Mississippi had the highest teen birth rate in the nation. Ralph Lauren’s “Polo” company donated gigantic boxes filled with brand new baby clothing to her program. She called this moment, her epiphany, dedicating her entire career work to the field of prevention and intervention as a senior in high school.

She attended Tougaloo College and after graduating with honors, Chara traveled throughout rural and urban areas of the state of Mississippi to deliver evidence-based curriculums to middle and high school students. She saw a need for culturally-based leadership curriculums and started writing her own. Those very same curriculums were then piloted throughout Mississippi’s juvenile detention centers for males and females. She found it a true honor to have helped change the lives of numerous youth in various settings. In 2013, Chara received the offer to move to Georgia to work for Girl Scouts. Her programmatic skill-sets were gifted to a more diverse and larger audience.

Chara had plans to stay at Girl Scouts forever but left in 2018. “Everything about Girl Scout’s framework fit my belief system. Even the founder of Girl Scout, Juliette Gordon Low, and I share birth dates,” she noted. But as fate would see it, the need to establish her own brand kept brewing on the inside of her. After continuously facing so many girls struggling with body image issues, and seeing the stories in the news of pre-teens killing themselves due to having insecurities and body dissatisfaction, Chara decided it was time to focus on creating the tools that helped her. She personally struggled with her own body image in her twenties and implemented a formula for freedom for her own life. She took this formula seriously and credits it to saving her life still today. She vowed to share her story with other girls who were struggling with the same mental health ills.

Thus, in 2019, Chara’s Memoir: Chara’s Story, Trying To Get To A Place Called Pretty. How I Discovered The Truth About Beauty” was released. Her book reveals to the world the gift of freedom from body image issues as she recounts her past struggles and triumphs dealing with a once disfigured face. In 2020, she established her own non-profit agency, Chara’s Story Inc - a non-profit print and electronic media organization on a mission to prevent the mental health disturbances stemming from the traditional beauty entity amongst young girls, teens, and women. (Click the pictures to learn more).

Chara continues to contract with different youth organizations and various non-profits around the globe. Her past work with United Way Greater Atlanta and Frontline Housing Inc. is one she mentions she is most proud of because it opened the doors for her to start her own non-profit. Her most recent work was for the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas. Chara has expanded her work and now partners with for-profit and non-profit youth agencies to help strengthen innovative social impact initiatives that improve the lives of teen girls.

To reach Chara, please email Chara@CharasStory.com