It's not easy to be a 13-year-old girl in an urban city. Just walking down the street can be an exercise in sexual harassment. Overtures from gang members - both male and female - are a daily reality, and even the youth-focused community centers can be dominated by boys and young men. In an effort to protect their daughters, many parents require their girls to come straight home after school, rather than hang out, unsupervised, with friends. So if you're 13, where do you find a haven, an Oasis?

• Project Documentation
• Project's Homepage
• Girl 2 Girl On-Line Scrapbook
• Your Life, Your Choice: A Girl-Produced Video
• Are You in Love with the Media or Me? Video

245 11th Street, Third Floor
San FranciscoCA94103
United States
415.701.7991
Organization's Homepage

Founded in 1999, Oasis is a multidisciplinary arts and youth development organization striving to advance the capacities and resources of high-need, low-income, immigrant girls and girls of color, ages 14-17. Our mission is to provide a safe space where girls are inspired and empowered to become strong and creative leaders. Offering life skills, arts, vocational and academic support and leadership training, and using a social justice, youth-development framework, we help marginalized girls and young women develop the academic, technological, job-readiness, artistic, and decision-making skills that foster positive self-determination. We operate year-round during out-of-school times (after school, school breaks, and summer vacation), coordinating with the calendar of the SF Unified School District. Typically, 100% of the girls we serve are low-income and 70-80% are immigrant/immigrant descent; approximately 25% are Asian American, 20% Latina, 15% African American, 20% Multiracial, 10% South American, 5% Pacific Islander, and 5% Filipina. Drawn from neighborhoods across the City, the girls and young women we serve may be enrolled in high school, may have graduated from high school but are not enrolled in post-secondary school, or may have dropped out of high school. More specifically, we seek to reach two types of girls: First are the "on the edge" girls, those who are on the cusp of involvement in, or are already involved in, the juvenile justice system or the foster care system; who are sexually active, pregnant, or parenting; do not have meaningfully beneficial relationships with their parents or are in conflict with them; are not well managed by other youth-service providers; have poor coping or interpersonal skills; and may be unproductively extroverted and provocative in their interactions with adults or other youth. Approximately two-thirds of Oasis girls fit these criteria: We estimate that 29% of our girls have special needs, 14% are in the juvenile justice system, 10% are at risk of entering the juvenile justice system, and 19% are homeless. For these girls, Oasis provides a "guardrail," modeling and exposing them to new ways of self-expression, cultivating positive decision-making, helping them build useful skills, and fostering prosocial behaviors and supportive relationships. We also serve "off the radar" girls: These are girls who are socially capable, who tend to be rule-followers, but who may go unnoticed by teachers and social service providers and who may have challenging home situations. For these girls, who may not have the ability to make the leap to the next stage of their capacity without the help of adult allies, Oasis can help build the bridge to the next phase of girls' lives.

Our core, arts-based services are provided through the Springboard Series, a yearlong sequence of programs that collectively foster the success of low-income, high need girls of color ages 14-17. Through an integrated continuum of lifeskills, arts exploration, and academic and job-readiness skills, we strive to provide extended connections and multiple modes of activity designed to build on one another through repetition and the development of incremental and complementary skills and experiences. All three programs within the Springboard Series are offered three times a year. Each program within the series meets three times a week for approximately two hours a day, serving 12-15 girls per program. Depending on the time of year and the SFUSD schedule, each program runs for 8-14 weeks, for 240 program hours per participant per year. This extended contact and sequential skills-building provides girls and young women with enduring opportunities to develop trusting relationships with positive, supportive adults, develop a sense of collective identity and partnership within their group and engage in an extended period of skills-development and practice. Each of the three programs within Springboard is designed to serve a specific function within the overall programmatic array, building on its predecessor and setting the stage for the next program: RISE focuses on "discovering myself"; Arts Apprenticeship moves into "discovering my world"; The Technology and Leadership program focuses on "building my future." In the past several years the economic recession has taken a serious toll on organizations for girls in San Francisco; today, Oasis For Girls is one of the city's few remaining girl-focused organizations, playing an increasingly central role in the landscape of services for low-income girls and young women of color. With these losses of other community institutions, the need for strong, effective girl-focused youth development services in San Francisco is especially great: By almost any measure, to be young, female, and of color in San Francisco means the odds are stacked against you: According to "A Report on Girls in San Francisco" issued by the SF Department on the Status of Women, 33% of public high school girls reported prolonged depression, 25% had been in physical fights within the past year, 8% had attempted suicide, 7% had been hit, slapped or hurt by a boyfriend or girlfriend, and 6% had been forced to have sexual intercourse. One-third had been offered drugs at school, 7% had recently missed school for fear of being bullied or harassed. Only 30% of girls passed the High School Math Exit Exam, and 48% passed Reading. This picture looks bleak, yet research tells us that organizations like Oasis can help girls beat these odds: To succeed, they need safe and sustained connections with adult allies who provide ongoing opportunities for girls to think critically, build practical skills, and be exposed to new possibilities. Through a yearlong sequence of interconnected activities, the Springboard Series provides this framework. All programs within the Springboard Series are offered three times a year. Each program within the series meets three times a week for approximately two hours a day, serving 12-15 girls per program. Depending on the time of year and the SFUSD schedule, each program runs for 8-14 weeks, offering a minimum of 80 hours of direct service per participant. All programs provide participation stipends, rising from $300 in RISE to $400 in Arts Apprenticeship and $500 in Technology and Leadership Program. This mixed-method array of youth development programs - through arts, lifeskills, leadership, and vocational/technology activities - reflects best practices in programming for at-risk girls. As a collective, continuous, yearlong array of programs, the Springboard Series establishes five qualitative goals. We call these core intentions our "5 Cs": 1. Consciousness: Raise consciousness and awareness 2. Context: Seeing themselves within a larger cultural/historical context 3. Competence: Fostering competency skills, self-esteem and self-reliance 4. Curiosity: Cultivating an attitude of exploration and discovery 5. Community: Developing positive relationships with female peers and adult role models

Jessica joined Oasis as the Rise Program Manager in January 2008. Today, she is Executive Director. Prior to joining Oasis, Jessica worked in youth development, primarily with LGBTQQ youth- supporting youth organizing efforts, leading anti-homophobia trainings for school personnel, and providing case management services.

Jah' Torri Bettis joined Oasis in 2007 as a member of the Leadership Institute. She is now a Youth Staff member, working closely with staff to support daily operations and to build her own capacities in program design and delivery. Jah’Torri co-facilitates the Girl 2 Girl program, has served as a staff on the Measure Up youth led evaluation, and ran the RISE program in Summer 2010.