I'm here with Melissa Dealy, integrative mind, body,
health practitioner, founder of Girls Matter.
And I'm dying to know, you know,
oh, I've got the wrong question on there too.
That's okay.
We're gonna shift gears anyways.
We all make mistakes.
Tell me about your vision, Melissa.
What are you up to?
I'm up to big things in the world.
So a couple of things.
With Girls Matter,
it's all about breaking the poverty cycle.
One girl, one family, one village at a time.
It's about stopping teenage marriages
by keeping girls in school.
Because unlike in North America,
where we have the option of public school education
that is largely free to parents,
in many countries around the world,
education comes at a cost.
And when you have a lot of children
and when your wages are not very high,
and when it comes down to putting food on the table
for most of your children or sending a daughter to school,
sometimes that hard decision is made
that I can't afford to send her to school.
And sometimes I can't afford to feed her either.
So I'm going to marry her off
because that becomes someone else's problem.
Keep going.
Keep going on there.
That's huge.
And I'm looking for a book reference.
And about, back in 2013,
I took my girl guides in the US,
you call them Girl Scouts.
I'm a Girl Guide leader
to watch the documentary called Girls Rising,
which was this documentary about girls
fighting for the right to an education.
And in North America, people ask me, girls matter.
Of course girls matter.
Why did you call it girls matter?
And it's because yes, in North America, girls matter.
But in other places around the world,
they don't matter enough.
So boys have the automatic right to an education
and girls don't.
And these girls were fighting for the right to an education.
It was the stories of girls being married off
at five years old to 50 year old men
and becoming their slaves.
And I watched this with tears running down my face.
I've had the privilege of growing up in Japan,
living the expat lifestyle, an incredible life of travel
and having been to third world countries and seeing this.
And yet hearing these stories of,
it was 10 or 15 girls in one documentary
just got to the core of me.
And I'm sitting in a room of kid,
20 girls that are like 10 to 14 years old,
my two daughters included,
knowing that every single one of them
had taken their education for granted at some point,
myself included.
We've all faked sickness
to get out of writing a test at school,
complained about having to go to school
at some point in our lives.
And yet somewhere else around the world,
girls are begging for the chance to go to school.
And so I knew then that I needed to do something about it.
I just had no idea how or what.
It seemed so big.
And so that was in the back of my head
for a couple of years.
And during that time,
I was let go from my corporate job
and moved into health and wellness.
And I was attending a conference
where the speaker said,
we are all put on this planet to never stop learning,
find our purpose and be of service.
And you don't have to know the how,
you just have to know the why.
And that resonated
because that took me to a place of I know my why.
And if I just start speaking it and sharing it with others,
the how will fall into place.
And you're scrolling through my,
Your Guided Health Journey Wellness website right now.
We also have the girlsmatter.ca website too.
And what I did after attending that conference
was I contacted the only two people
that I knew that had started a nonprofit
in British Columbia, Canada.
And I asked them, how did they do it?
Could they show me how to get started?
And they asked me, what do you wanna do?
And I told them, and they said, we'll do it with you.
And they already had preschools in Uganda and in Nepal.
And what we did is we piggybacked Girls Matter
on their nonprofits so we could be using the same staff
on the ground over there.
Because we don't decide what we're going to do for them.
We ask them what they need.
And we support them that way.
And so we launched in January of 2017.
Sorry, you're speaking, but are you muted?
Cause I didn't hear you.
That's girlsmatter.ca, correct?
That is correct, yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
And that's my passion project.
Yeah.
At the same time,
I have,
at the same time,
I've had to reinvent myself having been let go
from the corporate world almost 10 years ago.
And finding myself in health and wellness,
which I was guided into.
And my mission in the health and wellness world
is to put an end to chronic illness.
Chronic illness does not have to be a life sentence.
The body has this amazing innate power to heal
when we create the environment for it to heal.
And people can heal from chronic illness.
And even better, let's not get the chronic illness
in the first place.
And it's triggered by three things.
It's triggered by a high toxic load.
And we'll cover that.
Low nutrient.
We're gonna go into that.
And then Joe.
Yeah.
Perfect.
I'm excited to dive into both.
We'll do everything that we can.
We might bring you back for multiple vision stories,
in fact.
Let me pause it up because we are still,
let's see here.
So you talked about where this vision came from,
which I love that you talked about how you came to realize
that we take our education for granted.
I, for lack of better word, was slapped by an angel.
And you were quiet when I was down there
and told the same exact thing.
Why don't you go home, take advantage of your education
for once, and help as many towns like this one as possible,
rather than my dumb earthly plan that I had,
right, to make that happen.
And my international politics teacher had told me
before I went on that mission, he said,
if you wanna change a nation, educate a mom.
And then I read this book called Three Cups of Tea
by Grave Mortenson.
Is that what you were looking for?
What's that?
Yeah, I was one of the people looking for it.
Three Cups of Tea.
Starting schools for girls, et cetera.
I'm a big fan.
I'm a big fan of the concept and what he did
and how hard he worked to get it out there.
And it's all these things that you're doing.
I can see the interlacing, overlapping, the majesty of,
you've been maximizing your purpose.
You're maximizing your vision.
That's the neat thing about vision too, right?
You get on top of a mountain,
and yes, you can see and describe one direction,
but if you turn around,
you can see an entire new direction, right?
And-
Or you just see it all because you get,
nothing's in your way when you're standing
on top of the mountain.
That's right.
And if you create systems and stuff,
I'm a huge fan of the self-proclaimed quote,
you can have your cake, you can eat it too,
and you can have a conveyor belt of cakes
as inspired by Richard Branson.
Thank you, Richard Branson, right,
for leading the way in that regard.
So I know this is beautiful.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show,
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.