Amid emotional collapse and the overwhelming sense of invisibility that runs through so many women’s lives, a simple idea reignited Bruna de Ornelas’s purpose: to create a space where women could truly meet, both themselves and each other.
That’s how the Girl Talk Club was born: an alternative community weaving together care, learning, and belonging in the heart of São Paulo, Brazil.
Through in-person gatherings, conversation circles, creative clubs, and emotionally safe English workshops, the project has become a refuge for creative, intense women who don’t fit into the traditional corporate mold.
Bruna, who holds a degree in International Business and teaches English to adults, went through a deep depressive episode after facing homophobic abuse in the condo where she lived with her wife and young daughter.
Without institutional support and carrying a history of harassment, she decided to build, from scratch, a new way of inhabiting the world and helping other women do the same.
“I could only go back to teaching if I truly believed I was capable of delivering my best work. But I couldn’t return to teaching in the same way. I needed a life project. A legacy. A love letter to myself and to my students,” she wrote in a letter published on Girl Talk’s social media.
Since then, the club has brought women together for free events, expanding the conversation around identity, voice, and autonomy in a city where many feel alone, even when surrounded by people.
The community also became a space for collective English learning, using collaborative formats that break away from traditional rigidity and center listening, vulnerability, and exchange.
Among Girl Talk’s initiatives are:
- Open picnics for women, with conversations about career, creativity, and emotional support;
- Writing and artistic expression workshops, inspired by artists like Geloy Concepcion;
- Secret subscription-based clubs for more complex activities in smaller groups (reading, cinema, art, letter-writing, and business);
- Thematic workshops and circles with guests discussing self-esteem, communication, and life transitions;
- Online and in-person events on topics like “creative vulnerability,” “girl-owned business,” and “nonconforming professional identity.”
Today, Bruna leads the project alongside other women and is already preparing to expand into new educational formats while keeping the essence intact: no one needs to perform perfection to learn or to belong.
Girl Talk defines itself as a “space of subversive care,” created by women who are tired of bending to external expectations.
In contrast to toxic positivity and performative success, the club embraces the risk of deep listening and the courage to reappear.
English Classes for Adults
As an English teacher beyond the Girl Talk Club, Bruna describes her approach as decolonial and gender-conscious. To her, teaching a language is more than grammar and conversation, it’s about repositioning women in the world.
“We go after this knowledge and then feel ashamed to use it. Because those born with access look at us sideways. And that applies to everything: English, art, education. What I offer is more than a class, it’s a reclamation of belonging. The average student believes they don’t deserve to learn English. That’s not procrastination. It’s historic. It’s structural. It’s healing work,” she says.
Bruna explains that her teaching questions who gets access to knowledge and how that access is perceived by society.
“It’s not well seen when we learn later in life. The system values those born inside of it. But we belong at the table too. We just need to craft new utensils.”
Currently, Bruna offers both individual and group classes, shared mostly through communities and organic networks. Her focus is to keep the space intimate, safe, and collaborative without resorting to the performance of self-promotion.
