Non-Profit 501c3 EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATION

The Background

Our Story

Founded by Blythe Zemel in December 2020, Girl with Grit is a grassroot 501c3 nonprofit that began in order to empower girls through hands-on learning opportunities to develop life skills, career paths, and passions. Her ultimate goal was to help create a more independent girl. She was supported through the other efforts of the women and girls surrounding us such as Briana Huhn, Staci Andrews, Stephani Risinger, and more.

By 2022, we experienced exponential growth and a need for our programming to expand into working in all populations, all ages, and all gender.

In the short two years since its founding, Girl with Grit has played important roles in the transformation and growth for youth in our area. On average, we served over one hundred girls monthly in 2022, teaching them various vital lessons from the safe use of tools to how to properly change a tire; from how to start and operate a small business to culinary skills.

In 2023, we moved to The AgriCultural Museum and Arts Center to help develop an educational campus in Boerne, TX (just north of San Antonio, TX) to promote our vital hands-on life skills, our heritage, the arts, and a vision of an improved community hub.

Our camps and classes are all inclusive and have included youth in group homes, foster care, shelter residents, as well as the special needs population. Recently, we even partnered with Wounded Warrior Project to serve our veterans.

What Drives Us

Our Mission

We started as a purely GIRL POWER program but have adapted to include ALL per community needs and requests. We didn’t like being discriminated against as girls so we don’t discriminate against others.

Girl with Grit believes that saturating more general life skills from tires to sewing and carpentry to cooking can help develop more independence. Without these skills, one can be held back from careers, hobbies, passions, interests, and just plain life. Girl with Grit provides opportunities for youth, adults, and those in need of independent living skills to get these skills.

Girl with Grit has been in multiple publications and on various podcasts and was featured in the cover story “Girl Power” in the San Antonio Business Journal. We were also recognized by San Antonio Mayor Nirenberg and nominated as Best Nonprofit in Boerne, TX.