Rashida Holmes knew she wanted to DJ at 13. After spending most of her formative years in Liberia and Kenya, she returned home to Chicago with her mother and fell hard for house music. "That's kind of when I first thought how cool it would be to be a house DJ," says Holmes, now 34. "But it wasn't something I seriously considered, 'cause I didn't know any girls who did that. It was just, I was 13. So it was like, 'What am I gonna do?'"

She didn't do anything about it at the time, but she kept up with her listening and went into teaching instead. Mentoring girls solidified her desire to give them the DJ skills she'd always wanted. Friends praised her idea, but it didn't seem doable until two years ago, when she and fellow Chicago native Carolyn Chernoff met as community educators at Penn. "Carolyn said that she spun some records and I was like, 'Did you really?'" recalls Holmes, downstairs at Last Drop Coffee House. "And I'm thinking, 'You mean you played some CDs?' and she said, 'No, I spun some records.'"

The Girls' DJ Collective came together pretty quickly after that. Within a few months, Holmes and Chernoff had assembled an advisory board, reserved the Rotunda and enlisted nationally recognized DJ Lisa Love — the friend of a friend — as lead instructor. The Self Education Foundation funds the operation, so the basic programs are free; there's a 10-week after-school course for girls 13 to 18, a two-day boot camp for women and a free-for-all spin the last Saturday of each month. Classes are limited to eight people, and students are picked by lottery. The demand has been so great that they've started offering sliding-scale courses on a first-come basis.

A: Girls' DJ Collective B: Lisa Love C: Gina Renzi D: Sara Sherr E: DJ Boi Man F: Engine G: Funky Brewster H: DJ Kaliedoscope I: DJ Kendall J: DJ Licious K: DJ Teriyaki L: DJ Anonymous M: DJ Destructive

Lessons are geared toward beginners. The games and challenges, devised by Chernoff, teach students how to set up equipment, cue records and build a mood. "They're not going to come out scratch-masters or anything," Holmes says, "but they know everything that they need in order to go out and get all of the equipment that they need and practice themselves at home." The adult students became such fast friends they made plans to go equipment shopping together.

For Chernoff and Holmes, developing networks is just as vital as the music itself. They're both on the Rotunda's advisory board, and their community connections work to the collective's advantage: They've held a crate-digging lesson at The Marvelous and an end-of-course spin at Fluid, and they've gotten graduates on deck on Radio Volta (a West Philly-based Web station) and at a Spiral Q Puppet Theater open house.

Love plans to put former students to work as assistants, Chernoff says in an e-mail, and was especially generous to one of the adult students. "From what I hear, Lisa has been moving from vinyl to MP3s," says Chernoff, 29, "and after hearing DJ Licious spin a fierce set at Fluid, decided to give Licious the gift that keeps on giving — records."

Holmes, too, is excited about exposing a younger set to records. "Some of them come with knowledge of vinyl because their parents still have it; their parents are avid music lovers," she says. "But a lot of them have never seen vinyl, and they say, 'Can you get, you know, this No. 1 hip-hop song that's out now, can you get this on vinyl?' And we're like, 'Yeah, you can get that.'"

Right now, Chernoff, Holmes and Love are passing on skills to the next generation. In the long run, they hope the craft perpetuates itself. "Eventually our teens will be able to go through it and then go back and teach DJ 101 for Girls to other people," Holmes says. "So that's kind of what we're building up to, you know, that eventually we'll have this cadre of young women who can go back and teach other young women." If that happens, Holmes plans to offer advanced courses in scratching and beat-matching.

Nearly 20 years after Holmes first thought it would be cool to DJ, Chernoff and Love taught her the art of the mix. Now she can't get enough, and grabs every chance to experiment. But losing herself in deep Afro-Brazilian rhythms doesn't mean losing sight of her priorities. "While I'd like to be out there and be the best house DJ ever at some point, my joy as far as DJing comes from, you know, being a part of this collective with Carolyn and Lisa and teaching the basics to women and girls."

For more information about the Girls' DJ Collective and its classes, visit www.girlsdj.com.