Tracy Mourning Is Helping Black Girls Shine Nationwide

Founded in South Florida in 2002, Honey Shine Inc. is a nonprofit mentoring and sisterhood organization that focuses on empowering and reaching out to young girls of color and showing them that they can be even bigger than their dreams. What Mourning, 44, a Howard University alumna and former broadcast journalist who is married to NBA Hall of Famer Alonzo Mourning, wants to show these young women is that there is a world beyond what they know and believe. It’s a vision that Mourning is now planning to take nationwide, starting in Las Vegas, where she grew up.

“I know a lot of these young girls don’t have that mom that I had, don’t have those people pulling them up by their coattails or taking them outside of their neighborhoods. We have girls that come from neighborhoods called ‘the Graveyard’ where two out of 12 are graduating from high school. Not on our watch,” she said.

After all, it was a realization similar to the one Honey Shine tries to provide that Mourning, who was born in Cincinnati, believes saved her, too.

“A young lady had taken a group of us near the University of Cincinnati to get pizza. And I remember thinking and seeing all these students that I had no idea existed hanging out and spending time and finding out they went to college. I was like, ‘I want to do that,’” Mourning recalled of the incident that she says changed the course of her life.

“It was that one opportunity where you get to see something different than yourselves,” she continued. “And I genuinely and truly and heartbreakingly feel that there’s an attack that’s happening on young people, especially our young women of color. We know that it’s happening on our men. It’s been happening forever. And if our men suffer, our women suffer even more.”

It’s been hard work—about 13 years of tireless effort and fundraising—but Mourning is grateful for all that has happened.

“My thing is, we’re all here to serve in some way, shape or form; for me it’s girls,” she said. “I’m very clear. I want our girls to be empowered and to succeed. I have amazing girlfriends from fifth grade. We’re still ‘Homie, don’t you know me’ through high school, through college, and you know that’s a special thing, and I want other girls to have that as well,” she said.