At age 19, Thema Campbell came to Miami from Georgia with her childhood sweetheart, a baby and a future she pictured with a white picket fence. As she looks back now, her story weaved itself in a way she never imagined.
A half century later, Campbell is CEO of Girl Power Rocks, a non-profit organization that helps young women from underrepresented backgrounds gain confidence and stability through mentorship and mental health support.
Campbell grew up during the Jim Crow era, sheltered by her family from racial prejudice in rural Georgia. She remembers planting gardens, helping elderly neighbors and playing in the dirt surrounded by nine siblings and a passel of cousins.
“We were poor, but we never even knew it, because we always had everything we needed,” she said.
At the center of her childhood was her grandmother, Mama Hattie, whose small home sheltered battered women and became a gathering place for family. Cousins piled in after school and on weekends.
“She was a healer, she was love and that was our happy place,” Campbell said.
After arriving in Florida in 1975, Campbell was alone for the first time in her life. When her first relationship didn’t work out, she kept telling herself she would go back to Georgia. In 1977, she realized she didn’t need to wait for permission from anyone. With the confidence to know she could make her own decisions, she made a life for herself in Miami. In 1980, she married and had two sons and a daughter, dedicating herself to motherhood.
It wasn’t until she enrolled her two sons in a local mentoring program that her life of service began.
There she met future partners, Kiani Nesbitt and Latrisha Carter, where they founded and operated Concerned African Women from 1989 to 1999.
Campbell volunteered and met girls from broken homes with traumatic childhoods. She encountered families where there had been three generations of abuse from the same family member, and a girl that had cycled through five foster homes by age 12.
“I thought every girl had what I had,” Campbell said. “But they didn’t.”
For a decade, she worked with boys and girls, but kept gravitating toward the girls—their stories of generational trauma resonating deeper.
“We as women are the first teachers,” she said. “What’s happening is women bringing children into the world who haven’t healed from their trauma.”
By 2000, Campbell founded Girl Power Rocks, offering girls the stability and safe space she once had.
To Campbell, the problem wasn’t individual behavior but systemic failure to recognize trauma caused by molestation and sexual abuse. Pain is passed silently from mothers to daughters without intervention. Schools punished behavior without asking what caused it.
Girl Power Rocks started with a Miami-Dade Public Schools partnership, serving girls on 10-day suspensions. Campbell would ask: not “what’s wrong with you?” but “what happened to you?”
In 2001, she encountered an eight-year-old girl who was overly affectionate with men. When Campbell approached the girl’s mother, the woman responded: “My sister and I got molested when we were young. We’re okay. If she gets molested, she’ll be okay too.” The mother didn’t understand she wasn’t okay—she was living with unhealed trauma and letting it continue to grow.
In 2005, an 18-year-old in the program showed up on her birthday with all her belongings in a black garbage bag. Her father had told her: “The government says I don’t have to take care of you anymore.”
Campbell and her staff worked around the clock and found the girl a place to stay, eventually being adopted by the family of her mentor at Girl Power Rocks.
“A lot of what we do is not in our scope of services,” Campbell said. “Your work doesn’t end at five o’clock—it’s 24/7.”
After more than two decades, the organization has served over 2,000 girls, with 75% maintaining or improving their GPA, 81% increasing school attendance and 83% avoiding re-suspension.
The nonprofit offers six programs, including tutoring, life skills workshops, community service and college tours. Mental health counseling comes through a partnership with Jewish Community Services of South Florida.
“We were on a shoestring budget, and getting funders to allow a line item for mental health services was not a friendly process back then,” Campbell said.
Building the organization demanded the discipline and care Campbell inherited from Mama Hattie. Those lessons now guide the organization’s biggest expansion: Mama Hattie’s House, a shelter for girls aging out of foster care, set to break ground in early 2027.
When asked what gives her strength, Campbell doesn’t hesitate: “I believe in the power of the Almighty God. Girl Power Rocks is my ministry.”
It’s the same faith that sustained her grandmother. Mama Hattie, who built a safe space in her home. Now her granddaughter, born on her birthday, is building another in Miami.
The commitment to creating safe spaces doesn’t end with one generation. It becomes the foundation for the next.
