helping girls navigate the playbook of life
Coaching for girls and young ladies ages 12 - 22!
Coaches
Founder - Carletta S. Hurt
Founder - Carletta S. Hurt
Founder - Carletta S. Hurt
With nearly three decades worth of experience in education and nonprofits, Carletta S. Hurt is a powerful force in providing quality and engaging programs that build strong foundations within schools and communities.
Her nonprofit/community work includes program director for I Have A Dream – AD Williams and the Shandon Anderson Foundation;
With nearly three decades worth of experience in education and nonprofits, Carletta S. Hurt is a powerful force in providing quality and engaging programs that build strong foundations within schools and communities.
Her nonprofit/community work includes program director for I Have A Dream – AD Williams and the Shandon Anderson Foundation; assistant program manager for the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation – Blank Family Fellows and assistant camp director for the DeShawn Snow Foundation.
In addition to her nonprofit work, Carletta is a dedicated educator with work in grades K-20. She believes a quality education is an asset that every child should be afforded and understands the concept that, “it takes a village to raise a child.”
Currently, she is a School Counselor in the public school system of the District of Columbia. Carletta is also former President of the DC School Counselor Association (DCSCA) and recently joined the Counseling Advisory Committee at Trinity University. Her duties while with DCSCA included representing the organization at the 3rd annual White House Convening on Strengthening School Counseling and College Advising. She received her B.A. in Education from Oglethorpe University and her two advanced degrees (M.Ed., Ed.S) from Georgia State University. Carletta worked in Georgia as a teacher in Decatur City Schools and a counselor in Fulton County Schools.
Carletta was named the 2016 DC School Counselor of the Year (SCOY) by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). She along with other SCOY finalists visited with former First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House for a reception in their honor. In April of 2017, Carletta was recognized by the Oglethorpe University Alumni Association with the Bell Award. She was recently awarded Mentor of the Year by the DC chapter of the National Black MBA Association.
She has a youth development company, IN THE LOOP Program of Success, which provides ongoing, engaging programs to empower, educate and elevate young people. Hurt is working on her first novel, 20 Reasons Why I Love Girl Power (and you should too) set for release Fall 2020.
A literacy and youth advocate, lover of the arts, and passionate about issues around youth development, she’s down to help others gain momentum and movement behind their own areas of interest.
Coach - Melva Mulllins
Founder - Carletta S. Hurt
Founder - Carletta S. Hurt
Melva Mullins work reflects an invested career serving youth and families that spans over 25 years in community based organizations, city government, hospital settings and schools throughout Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia. She has dedicated her passion and skills in areas of homelessness, HIV/AIDS, parenting and teen pregnancy prev
Melva Mullins work reflects an invested career serving youth and families that spans over 25 years in community based organizations, city government, hospital settings and schools throughout Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia. She has dedicated her passion and skills in areas of homelessness, HIV/AIDS, parenting and teen pregnancy prevention. Consequently, she has developed and thrived in her roles as a group facilitator, clinical Social Worker and Program Manager. Ms. Mullins has a B.S. in Health Science with a concentration in school and community health, a MSW with a concentration in youth and families, and M. Ed with a concentration in special education focusing on challenging behaviors. She holds a LICSW to practice in Washington, DC.
Coach - Coleta Ezidore
Founder - Carletta S. Hurt
Coach - Coleta Ezidore
Coleta Ezidore is the Senior Manager of Diversity Equity & Inclusion at Fossil
Group. In her role, she is responsible for implementing and executing DEI
initiatives at Fossil. Coleta joined Fossil in August 2021. Prior to joining Fossil,
Coleta worked at Allstate Insurance Company for 25 years where she
held a variety of roles in Claims,
Coleta Ezidore is the Senior Manager of Diversity Equity & Inclusion at Fossil
Group. In her role, she is responsible for implementing and executing DEI
initiatives at Fossil. Coleta joined Fossil in August 2021. Prior to joining Fossil,
Coleta worked at Allstate Insurance Company for 25 years where she
held a variety of roles in Claims, Operations, Information Technology, Sales and Human Resources.
Coleta is an active member of Jack and Jill of America, Inc., Far North Dallas
Chapter, Young Men’s Service League (YMSL), West Frisco Chapter and serves on the One Community Church Careers Ministry. She is a board member of Big Brother Big Sisters Lone Star, Denton County.Coleta and her husband, Steven, and their two sons, Marcus (19) and Myles (15) reside in Frisco, Texas.
AI Replacing Writers? Not So Fast.
By Darron Shell, PhD/EdD
A Promising Debut
As many others did during quarantine nights of watching YouTube videos about people making millions selling planners, journals, and eBooks…I made one. Eventually. I used ChatGPT to write Etsy product descriptions, marketing copy, and titles — and it initially seemed magical. Seconds later, I had a full product description complete with bullet points, keywords, and a professional tone. If you’re new to ecommerce, writing at that speed and with that much thoughtfulness was helpful. ChatGPT assisted with identifying holes in the market and demand within over-saturated niches.
"AI provided the scaffolding. I had to build the house myself and furnish it with a personality the algorithm simply could not replicate."
The Cracks Began to Show
The descriptions were shiny and polished, but they were also thoroughly generic. Every guide I created on Canva — including my flagship, How to Create and Sell Digital Products — looked and read like hundreds of identical guides already flooding the market. I wanted to stand out with personality and voice. Instead, I duplicated someone else, unintentionally.
When I plugged my digital shop into a sales funnel connected to a TikTok channel, I quickly realized the problem in full. My shop sounded exactly like every other shop. In the end, I rewrote every description by hand, infusing the structure the AI had generated with the character, warmth, and personal story that the algorithm had left out.
AI's Usual Suspects — Overused Words to Watch For
Repetition, Hallucination, and the Black Box
Beyond the problem of generic tone, AI has more fundamental limitations as a writing tool. Because it is driven by statistical patterns in its training data, it tends to reproduce the same phrases and sentence structures repeatedly — making AI-generated text increasingly easy to identify, both informally and under the scrutiny of detection software.
Reliability becomes a far more serious concern when AI is applied to high-stakes work, such as academic writing. AI operates as a veritable "black box," relying on probabilities rather than the kind of deep, verified knowing that human expertise produces. It can invent citations, generate false statistics, and assert fabricated information with complete confidence. Researchers call this phenomenon hallucination and in contexts where accuracy is non-negotiable, it is a disqualifying flaw.
What Writing Actually Is
AI cannot match the level of personalization that emerges from genuine human experience. My own history as a creator — the 2 a.m. YouTube sessions, the trial-and-error with ManyChat automations, the pride I felt in writing personalized DMs rather than automated ones was not incidental to my writing. It was the writing.
We write because we feel things. We remember things. We see things. We wonder about things. We believe things. In ways that are unique to us as individuals. The reader can tell when you're being authentic. That texture, the wit, the fragility, the bite, the heart; that's not style that you sprinkle on top of your words. It is the words. It is the reflection of you.
"AI can still tell a story. But I am not sure it can tell our story — and that distinction may be everything."
Partnership, Not Replacement
Could AI be trained on an individual writer's voice to produce more personalized output? Almost certainly and services pursuing exactly this already exist. But even in that scenario, the authentic source material, the lived experience being modeled, originates with the human. The algorithm is the echo; the writer is the voice.
Those who predict AI will render human writers obsolete keep overlooking one foundational fact: it was humans who created this technology in the first place. The more useful question is not whether AI will replace writers, but how writers can use AI to do more of what only humans can do — connect, illuminate, persuade, and surprise.
The first time I asked an AI to write something for me, I was impressed. The output was quick, tidy, and sounded surprisingly good. That was one of the issues: it only sounded good. Here is what I learned when the illusion wore off — and why I believe human writers are not going anywhere.