Urban Thought Collective

Raven Symone teams up with Dove to tackle teen self esteem issues.
Presented by Electronic Urban Report.

Raven Symone has been a successful child model, a movie star, a recording star, and conquered television, including her Emmy-nominated Disney show “That’s So Raven” – Disney Channel’s highest-rated and longest-running series.

It spawned Disney’s most successful franchise, including soundtracks, dolls, episode DVDs, and video games. Raven Symone has built an empire.

However, in all the triumphs and honor, it might surprise fans that the young star has also had to face off in self-esteem battles. That is in part why she has teamed with Dove for the Dove Self-Esteem Workshop Tour.

“We go around the country and talk to girls from the ages of 11-12 about self-esteem,” she explained.

Raven told EUR’s Lee Bailey that 7 out of 10 girls believe that they’re not good enough or don’t measure up in some way.

“When that happens, they turn to eating disorders and cutting and bullying and smoking and drinking to curb that,” she continued. “Hopefully by 2010 we will be able to reach 5 million girls to open their definition of beauty and give them the correct language to speak about their bodies.”

Raven said that she got involved because she loves doing things that help grow the confidence level of young females, and that she has always promoted that sense of confidence in her work as an actress and singer.

“I liked Dove because for a long time they’ve been doing the ‘Real Beauty’ campaign with no air brushing and no pulleys and strings,” she said. “I wanted to work with them for that reason and then they told me about this. It’s right up my alley, especially with my website, ‘Raven Symone Presents.’ It has all kinds of tie-ins with understanding and loving yourself and enjoying your confidence level.”

The 90-minute workshops sits down groups of pre-teen girls with Raven and author Jess Weiner and go through worksheets, exercises, role playing and other tools to talk to girls about inner beauty.

“We identify problems around you and in your life that are either bringing your self-esteem down or helping your self-esteem grow. We also show [attendees] pictures [showing] the difference between air brushing and not air brushing all the way up to role playing and putting them in situations so that when we’re not there helping them they know how to handle the situation of low self-esteem areas.”

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