The last 14 months have left most people feeling overwhelmed and slightly jaded. If you have spent a lot of time worrying about the future that is okay. So much change has happened over the last year. The good news is you don’t have to have all the answers. You can look back on this
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Our SHINE Festival in March 2021 was a roaring success, smashing all of our targets with 40,000 girls attending. Over 80 incredible, authentic and badass women joined us to celebrate being a girl for 3 whole days! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be catching up with some of the speakers to share why we
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I am not being overdramatic when I say that doing a Post-Leaving Cert Course (PLC) was the best decision I’ve ever made for myself. Seriously. Last September, I enrolled in a Level 5 course in Art, Craft, and Design, and it gave me so much freedom to learn and grow, not only as an artist
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Every week, we tell you about some of the amazing ladies we have the honour of sharing this planet with. This week, we thought, what about all of the ladies that we look up to, that aren’t real?! For this week’s Shona Heroes, we’re highlighting some impressive leading ladies from animated shows. **Spoilers will be
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Whether you know her for wearing a red jersey for Cork, as a coach on Ireland’s Fittest Family or bopping her way across the dance floor on Dancing With the Stars, over the last few years, Anna Geary has become a name we all know and love. Just like us here at SHONA, Anna aims
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Do you ever find yourself in a funk or a mood and have no idea how to get out of it? Well, we have asked our Shona Ambassador and health psychology expert Orna Murray to talk about how movement can unlock way more energy and help you to feel more positive and open. Body &
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Our mission at Shona, which we do accept, is to inspire and empower girls. So for this week, our chosen hero is Dench. Dame Judi Dench. Actress, philanthropist, advocate, it’s hard to choose what we like most about Dame Judi. Luckily, we don’t have to. With experience on both the theatre stage and the silver
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Hey, welcome back. In our last post, we talked about confidence (you can check it out HERE). As confidence usually involves taking a bit of a risk, which can sound dangerous and scary, we want to chat about it a little more. When you look up the word “Risk” in the dictionary, it usually mentions
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How many times have you been told you should “have more confidence in yourself?” It’s not exactly helpful, as confidence doesn’t grow on trees and isn’t given out as a freebie with a Happy Meal. To be honest, most of us don’t even know what it really even means. Well, here we are, your friends at
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Learning to Love Unlike many people’s coming out stories, I never really ‘came out’, instead I see it as a process of accepting myself and my sexuality. I grew up Catholic like many others in Ireland, attending mass on Sundays and going to a Catholic primary and secondary school. We never learned about same-sex couples
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Hi, y’all! My name is Julie (she/her/hers) and I’m an intern here at SHONA. Today, I’m going to share my story. I was around 14 when I first began questioning my sexuality. Maybe this story sounds familiar: I’d grown up in a community that assumed people were straight and treated anyone different as weird at
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If you’ve ever watched “Orange Is The New Black” you will, of course, recognise Laverne Cox, who played the sassy but vulnerable Sophia Burset. Whilst OITNB gave Laverne her big break, we now know and love her as a huge advocate and inspiration for trans folks. Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, Laverne was a
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I have never struggled with a piece of writing more than this one. I have opened and closed this word document what feels like 100 times in the last few weeks, trying to find the right words. The document is saved as “pride month”, and I think the reason that I am struggling to
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In a weird way, I was lucky to have had a little bit of a different leaving cert experience than most others have. I say “in a weird way” because it wasn’t exactly lucky that I was depressed during my leaving cert. However, it did allow me to have a very different perspective on the
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We won’t lie to you, Cristine Rotenberg is a firm fav of the whole SHONA team and we were buzzing at the chance to do a Shona Heroes on the holo queen herself! Whether you are new to the holo fam or you’ve been there since polish mountain, we guarantee you’ll be heading over to
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via GIPHY Hey! It’s us again. You know, your cool best friends that are a little further down the life road than you, and are sharing all of our learnings with you so you don’t have to make the same mistakes as we did (hello blue mascara!) With summer in full flow and life starting
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Anxiety. It’s often a feeling that people put down as occasional nervousness, maybe before a big exam, or before a big event. But what some people don’t know, is this ‘feeling’ can overtake your whole mind and body, and leave you feeling that you’re on the brink of breaking down 24/7. That’s what happened to
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As many of you may know, we ran 2 competitions over the month of May. One of those was a design competition where we worked with our amazing friends at The Wonderkind, who are launching a new range of beautiful badges, each featuring an inspiring female designed by one of you! We had hundreds of entries and
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