OKTIBBEHA COUNTY – A group of middle school girls took turns addressing aldermen Tuesday night at Starkville City Hall, stepping to the podium to introduce themselves and share the wards and districts where they live.

For most, it was their first time speaking in a setting where city business is conducted.

Both Carmen Haynes and Malorie Miles, 13, said they were nervous to speak before the board but agreed they enjoyed seeing firsthand how the city operates.

“It was nice to see how people do around the city and stuff,” Haynes told The Dispatch on Wednesday. “How they fix things, and they take people’s opinions and … try to focus on their opinions and get it fixed.”

The visit to City Hall was part of a lesson on civic engagement, offered to a cohort of nine girls ages 11 to 13 through the Youth Leadership Institute, an initiative sponsored by the Starkville chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Now in its fourth year locally, the program is designed to expose young girls to leadership development through hands-on lessons in civic engagement, environmental awareness, self-expression and confidence-building.

Aundrea Self, a member of the Starkville chapter who is leading the initiative this year, said lessons like Tuesday’s are meant to help the girls better understand their communities and their roles within them.

“We try to provide them with educational services and programs, workshops and field trips, all these things that help them to basically develop leadership skills and to expose them … to things that they may not get inside the classroom, that develops them as whole people,” Self told The Dispatch on Wednesday.

While national politics may dominate the news at home, Self said the program helps girls understand the importance of understanding local government.

“The things that affect your family and you most closely are things that happen in your town,” she said. “… We want them to understand how that process works, to get just a little glimpse of it.”

Civic involvement is just one part of the program’s broader mission to grow leaders. At their first meeting last month, the girls gathered around tables covered in magazines, stickers, markers and poster boards to create vision boards representing their goals and dreams.

“I put an A-plus on my vision board because I want to keep all my A’s and my grades (up),” Miles told The Dispatch. “I put a smile on there because I want to smile more, and then stuff revolving around kindness and being happy because I want to have a more positive attitude this year. … I think it was really nice to do the vision boards, because it helped us learn how to set goals and think about how to work towards our goals.”

Haynes said her vision board focused more on words of affirmations than specific images, using words like “improvement” and “saving” to encourage her growth in theater and to save money.

“I think being able to visualize something that you dream about makes it feel tangible to you,” Self said. “… It makes you believe that it is actually possible, and so you work toward doing the thing that you say you want to do. … I think it really gives them sort of the motivation to work toward it.”

Haynes and Miles said, in years past, lessons have included fashion walks to learn appropriate attire for job interviews and school events, as well as etiquette workshops where they learned table manners and how to navigate formal dinners.

“I love it because I can tell my friends about it and encourage them to do it because it’s a really fun time,” Miles said. “It’s a … good group of months, and you just get to have fun and try new things and learn. It’s very interesting.”

Miles, who is in her second year of the program, said her favorite activity has been last year’s mini career fair, where girls met professionals including chemists, professors, entrepreneurs and doctors.

“Those are jobs you would need to use the skills we learn,” she said.

Self said each activity is designed to combine lessons with hands-on learning.

“I think in every one of those … there’s a little bit of a learning component, but then there’s a doing component,” Self said. “And I think that the doing component of it is what drives the lesson home, and it makes it personal to them, and it’s much more impactful than just sitting in a room telling them these things.”

The group will relive many of the same activities this year, along with new ones including a tree-planting for Arbor Day.

As the girls look ahead, Haynes and Miles said the program has already helped shape their future goals.

Haynes said while she’s still deciding what she wants to be when she grows up, she’s leaning toward interior design, a career she believes the program’s focus on communication will support.

Miles said the program is already helping her toward her dream of becoming a physical therapist.

For Self, confidence is the most important takeaway she hopes the girls carry with them when the program concludes in May.

“This is a tricky age,” she said. “… They’re finding out who they are. They’re finding their people. … I hope they’re going to emerge with a greater sense of confidence, a greater sense of discernment about making decisions in their educational lives and their personal lives and their social lives, and … have the confidence and good decision making for sure.”

Co-leader Jessica Young, a student support teacher at Partnership Middle School, said she has seen that confidence grow firsthand in girls like Haynes and Miles.

“Each year brings about a new group of girls and new fun activities. I’ve been able to see these girls just blossom,” she said. “… Hopefully they’ll take these skills that they learn and become productive citizens, and hopefully one day we may have a woman president.”