Ashley Aikele and Elyse Beard are longtime friends who, between the two of them, had five children under six when they launched a Kickstarter for Bravery Magazine in 2017. The idea was simple and the frustration behind it was shared: they wanted to provide their kids with strong female role models beyond princess dresses and fairy wands. Aikele had a background in advertising and photography; Beard had studied elementary education and had a talent for writing. Neither had any experience in publishing. The Kickstarter was fully funded in three days and raised double the target. The first issue, featuring Jane Goodall — illustrated by Rebecca Green — was so popular it had to be reprinted.
Bravery is a quarterly print publication for children aged five to twelve (though adults and younger kids love it too). Each issue is devoted entirely to one brave woman: her life, her struggles, and her contributions to the world. Past issues have featured Frida Kahlo, Mae Jemison, Maya Angelou, Zaha Hadid, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Yusra Mardini — the Syrian swimmer who pulled a sinking dinghy of refugees to safety in the Aegean Sea. Every issue includes an illustrated biography, educational activities, STEAM experiments, colouring pages, recipes, DIY projects, and a trait — resilience, empathy, curiosity, moral courage — that the featured woman embodies.
The magazine is for boys and girls equally, and the team is emphatic about this: women are not inherently less interesting to boys, and girls have been learning about men for centuries. Bravery is a resource, not a product — a tool for parents, teachers, and caregivers to facilitate the conversations that help children grow into brave humans. In a children’s media landscape dominated by franchises and screen time, it is a quietly radical proposition: a printed magazine that tells children, issue after issue, that the world is full of women who did extraordinary things, and that they can too.
<a href="https://braverymag.com/" target="\_blank">Visit Bravery