Minnesota NOW is thrilled to welcome Nancy Gruver, founder and publisher of New Moon Girl Media, to our 40th Anniversary Conference.

Gruver and her husband, Joe Kelly, founded New Moon Girls magazine in 1992 to provide a place where girls like their twin daughters, Nia and Mavis, could bridge childhood and adolescence with confidence and intelligence.  As Gruver told the website Care2, “The media that was available to girls then, is much like it is now…  it’s full of ads that are designed to make girls feel they’re lacking in some ways and that they need to buy something to fix that. And New Moon doesn’t have that. New Moon is about girls telling the world who they are, rather than the media telling girls who they should be.”

On this year’s Equal Pay Day, April 12, an 11-year-old nicknamed Veda Blueberry wrote a blog post for New Moon Girls on the subject, telling her readers: “It’s hard to believe that in 2011, a woman makes less than a man just because she’s a…girl.”  (we can’t believe it, either, Veda.)  “[creating content for New Moon] is very powerful for the girls,” Gruver told Care2. “They’re doing it, and to them, that’s the way it ought to be, which I like a lot! They think ‘I should be able to say what I think about the oil spill in the Gulf, or the war in Afghanistan, or who my favorite celebrity singer is. I should be able to be interested in all these things. I don’t have to be the stereotype of a tweeny bopper.'”

Gruver is also author of the book How to Say It to Girls: Communicating With Your Growing Daughter and runs the parenting blog Daughters.com.  She’ll talk with us about the genesis of New Moon, what working with girls has taught her, and how parents and others can support the next generation of activists–the ones who will be Moving Equality Forward in the next century and beyond!

Register for the conference here: http://www.mnnow.org/events/2011_conference.htm

SPECIAL OFFER: Minnesota NOW fans receive a discount on new subscriptions by clicking here: http://www.newmoon.com/offer/?code=MNNOW