By Alison Nakamura Netter | Chief Communications & Development Officer
Dear Friends,
Thanks to you and all of our amazing supporters, the fall has already been deeply impactful! We are thrilled to share that we have launched our 3rd issue of Nia Teen magazine, and that we also held our final community-strengthening program of the year.
Self Love. Self Respect. Self Worth. Voice. Choice. Agency.This is the theme of our 3rd issue of Nia Teen, and our pilot issue is hot off the press! This issue not only emphasizes the importance of self-love, but also covers the importance of finding your voice in the context of power-dynamics, gender-based violence, and assault. We teach girls that assault and disrespect are never acceptable, and offer guidance on consent, reporting abuse, and seeking support from safe people.
Girls are at the center of everything we do. That's why we test our magazine content among the girls we serve, to ensure we’re providing the relevant information that girls seek and need during adolescence. With our partner, Fountain Youth Initiative, we shared issue 3 among 200 primary schoolgirls in Nairobi in Septemeber. Based on feedback gathered from this distribution, we will finalize the content of issue 3 within this next month before distributing it in January to 3,000 girls in our seminal research study, The Nia Project.
In other news, thanks to our longtime partner, The PaperSeed Foundation, we hosted an amazing two-day workshop with our 14 community-based partners in Nairobi on Septmeber 14th and 15th, where we strengthened our shared interventions to help girls stay in school and thrive. We also distributed sanitary pads to reach 10,000 marginalized girls this school term. It was thrilling to hear from our partners about how access to pads, rights-based health education, and safe people, has positively impacted the lives of girls in their communities.
As a result of our interventions, our partners reported:
•Increased confidence of girls which boosted their grades in school
•Reduced cases of school absenteeism due to menstruation
•Reduced taboo surrounding menstrual hygiene in schools
•Reduced cases of teen pregnancies and subsequent child marriage
•Reduced cases of infections caused by unsanitary alternatives to pads
These are just a few examples of why our holistic interventions and community-based solutions are so critical to girls’ development. We are deeply honored to help girls safely and confidently navigate puberty, and we thank you for your enduring support. Thank you for everything you do!
Warm regards,
Alison
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