After months of planning and campaigning, CHAARG, a girls’ health and fitness organization, is officially founding a chapter on Boston University’s campus next year.
CHAARG, which stands for Changing Health, Attitudes and Actions to Recreate Girls, aims to ignite a passion in college-aged girls for health and fitness, according to the organization’s website.
Brandy Moser, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, led the initiative to bring CHAARG to campus, and will be BU’s CHAARG ambassador.
Moser said the process of bringing CHAARG to BU required her to go through an application process and several interviews. Then, students needed to make a certain number of posts on Instagram with the hashtag #BringCHAARGtoBU to show support for the cause.
Moser said there was a large response from BU students on Instagram, and support from other schools with CHAARG chapters as well. She said she made it through the first round of the application process in mid-February, and in mid-March she found out CHAARG would officially be coming to BU.
Now Moser must go through a nine-week training process as an ambassador where she will work through all of the steps necessary for building the executive team, reaching out to girls and officially establishing the chapter.
“It has been such an amazing experience hearing the responses from girls, hearing their stories, hearing why the want to be involved in CHAARG,” Moser said. “The whole process of bringing CHAARG to BU has been very inspiring and motivating and makes me want to do it more and get more involved.”
Moser said there are over 200 girls on her email list interested in joining the organization.
The biggest struggle in this process, Moser said, is that CHAARG will not be an official club at BU until next year, as she must still go through the application process.
“It looks promising,” Moser said. “It looks like next year hopefully we will be able to be an official club, but we’re still going to do outreach and talk to girls now.”
Imani Roberson, a sophomore in the College of Communication, wrote in a Facebook message that she is interested in joining CHAARG because she thinks fitness is important for maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and that sometimes it is intimidating to work out on campus without a support system.
“These types of groups are important because they ultimately help to empower women and show them that women can participate in any fitness activity that they so choose,” Roberson wrote.
Moser said social media campaigning for CHAARG at BU will start this week in order to give girls the opportunity to start reaching out to other people who are interested and to motivate the girls to work out with each other. Official meetings will not begin until next fall.
“I think now it’s just giving people the outlet to find girls like them and that’s what CHAARG is all about, finding people with the same mindset and spreading that mindset to other girls and helping them learn and feel comfortable,” Moser said.
Next year, CHAARG will have weekly studio spotlight meetings, where an instructor will come to BU’s campus to teach activities ranging from yoga to kickboxing.
In bringing CHAARG to BU, the motivation is to give girls the resources needed to change their health, fitness and lifestyle and to have a safe space to do so.
Priya Viramgama, a freshman in CAS, has helped Moser in spreading the word about CHAARG and coming up with ideas for future events. Viramgama said Moser has worked very hard in training as an ambassador and making sure everything for CHAARG will be ready by the fall.
“She’s learning all the rules and regulations associated with CHAARG,” Viramgama said. “Her training is similar to having another online college class because she is tested on the material to make sure she understands it.”
Scarlett Seneta, a freshman in CAS, wrote in a Facebook message that she wants to join CHAARG because she wants to obtain lifelong friendships with people who have the same interest in being as happy and healthy as her.
“I have a feeling [that] girls get pretty close with each other, and who doesn’t love new friends?” Seneta wrote. “Groups like these are important because they [bring] so many different walks of life together. Nothing else matters but interest in working out and being part of a community.”
Nicole Marino, a sophomore in COM, wrote in a Facebook message that she is interested in joining CHAARG because she wants to be motivated to make exercising more of a priority in her life.
“I think health tends to become a low priority to a lot of college students and making something like going to the gym fun could inspire a lot of girls to try to put health first,” Marino said. “Exercise is also a great stress reliever, so taking the time to do it could really be great for people our age.”
