TLC’s Chilli held her second annual Chilli’s Crew summer camp for girls over the weekend in Atlanta. The four-day, three-night camp was packed with mentoring sessions and activities geared toward building the campers’ self-esteem and teaching them to focus on inner beauty, health and setting goals for their future. In addition to the female mentors hand-selected to speak to the girls, Chilli asked one of her longtime industry friends, Big Tigger, to mentor her girls in a session called “Ask a Guy with Big Tigger.”
“We tell the girls that they are beautiful and deserve to be in healthy relationships with friends and with boys too, but there is something about a man that young girls look up to and respect co-signing our message that I think the girls really need to hear,” Chilli explained. “Tigger is a great example of someone that young girls can relate to of course because of his celebrity, but I also knew he would be able to give them some really honest but positive advice when it came to their relationships with boys.”
Twenty girls between the ages of 13-17, sat on couches and lounge chairs for an intimate after dinner conversation with V-103’s Big Tigger and Chilli. Tigger began the discussion by encouraging the girls to be mindful of the reputation they are building for themselves via social media.
“Today, what you put on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are the biggest representations of who you are. If something were to happen to you, people would immediately go to your Twitterfeed, you have to think is that really the picture of you that you want people to get?” he said.
Tigger referenced Trayvon Martin and a few other cases where young people were judged via the images they uploaded to social media.
Under Chilli’s encouragement the girls opened up and began asking questions ranging from, “Have you met Justin Bieber” to “How do I know if a guy likes me?” to “Why do guys want to have sex with girls and then deny the girl if she gets pregnant?” The discussion was frank and candid, and Tigger delivered straight answers, concluding the discussion with several pieces of advice. “You only get one body, so you should do everything you can to take care of it. The last thing I want to tell you all is to just make them wait … you’re worth it and you have to know that,” he said.
Chilli’s Crew is a nonprofit camp for girls between the ages of 13-17 that focuses on building a healthy self-esteem in young women starting from the inside out.
“This year was even bigger than last year as we had great sponsors, and were able to do more impactful workshops. We plan to keep the numbers intimate because we want the girls to really walk away feeling as though they had a one on one experience,” explains executive director, Christal Jordan. “Chilli’s Crew allows us four days and three nights to be the biggest voice in these girl’s lives. We do workout sessions for physical health, goal setting and mentoring sessions, we bring in an OB-GYN to discuss sexual health, and then mini makeovers for their external beauty. I love the fact that Chilli uses her celebrity to really nurture these young women and plant seeds in them that we look forward to seeing blossom in their future.”
