by Mitchell Sasser | WeINSPIRE Reporter 

HARRISONBURG, Va. - When Lindsey Turnbull was in college at the University of Central Florida, she saw a flyer for the Young Women Leaders Program. Turnbull applied on a whim, and was chosen to be a ‘big sister’ mentor to middle school girls. Turnbull was just looking for a place to make connections with friends and be a positive role-model, and this experience inspired her to continue that passion with MissHeard Media. 

Turnbull is the founder of MissHeard Media, a platform that “emboldens and empowers tween and teen girls to be smart, savvy, and global through original media and skills-building live events.” Turnbull said that the inspiration behind the name came from situations where teen girls are misheard. She wanted to capacitate a change in narrative taking what is often a negative, frustrating situation and positioning it as a positive affirmation.

“If [MissHeard Media] had existed when I was a kid, it would have been great to have a space where I felt validated and heard,” Turnbull said. “I feel like most people feel like they don’t fit in. I felt like I was too weird for the normal kids and not weird enough for the weird kids, so to have a supportive community would have really helped me feel a little more stable.”

 MissHeard Media is more than just a space for Turnbull to spread content. It’s a platform for girls to share their own stories. There are teen advisory board members who share monthly blogs as well as art, personal stories, and essays.

 One of those board members is Riv, a sophomore undergraduate student attending the University of Delaware. Lobban wrote A Seven Year Nightmare: The Journey of Finding and Freeing Myself for MissHeard Media, where they detailed their transition from a dark pit of despair, to a place of hope and renewal.

“That piece is really about digging into a part of myself that I literally spent so much of my life trying to bury,” Lobban said. “That piece was allowing them to rise up and just be the light for once basically.”

Lobban said it’s “major important” for MissHeard Media to exist so girls have a space to share their ideas and stories. Lobban said as they move forward with their writing career, they will remember MissHeard Media and Turnbull for providing affirmation and caring about what they have to say. 

“I think it’s really important for all young women to really cultivate a strong sense of self-worth, to really know who they are and appreciate that person,” Turnbull said. “To take care of that themselves, to take care of their mental health, to understand warning signs of toxic relationships, and to put themselves out there and be who they are and be brave and to accept who they are and to really like that person.”

Turnbull said that MissHeard Media’s purpose is to connect young girls who can relate to one another and to provide a space where they know what they say is important.

 “Ultimately, at the core of everything, whether it’s a creativity camp or an activism camp, the core of it is - who I am matters and what I have to say matters,” Turnbull said.

 Some of the live events include a Leadership Bootcamp where tween and teen girls learn to lead with confidence and set goals to create an action plan. Half-day events include storytelling, media literacy, personal power, and activism.

  One of the stories that Turnbull loves to share involved an incident at a summer camp program. The girls decorated journals, and were devastated to return the next day to find that the cleaning staff had ruined their work. Turnbull’s mentality was that this was an accident and that they needed to find a way to deal with their anguish. 

But the girls had a different idea. They organized a mock trial and assigned roles to each other, with various girls being put on trial to see if they were guilty of the heinous crime of ruining the journals. 

“It was hilarious, they got so into it, and they were so passionate,” Turnbull said. “Some of the girls really took the lead in assigning roles, and even girls that were just handed roles really got into it. They ended up putting half of the administrative staff on trial, which was amazing. And of course, everyone was guilty.”

In the end, the girls got to re-do the journals, with all of the sadness gone from the loss of their original journals after the judicial proceedings. 

“It’s really rewarding to think that maybe something we’ve done together is going to shape them in some kind of meaningful way,” Turnbull said.

 “This is not what I expected to be doing at this point in my life,” Turnbull said. “I really thought I would finish graduate school, and I would move from Florida to D.C. and I would work in a museum and maybe, eventually, I would come back to working with girls. The girls I serve give me hope on days that feel like a struggle.”

 Moving forward with MissHeard Media, Turnbull hopes to do more events and seminars that focus on parents to help families better support their teenage daughters and remind them what it was like to be at that age.