Girls voices matter in Chicago and abroad

This summer, the Global Girls team built our 2022-23 strategic plan around creating communities of girls excited to live in possibilities as they become those who are RARE. What does that mean? Girls who understand, embrace and practice

• Respect for Rituals personal and organizational
• Awareness of the world inside their minds and bodies before the world outside
• Acceptance of personal Responsibility in every situation
• Emotional intelligence seeking first to understand, choosing to pause and consider consequences before responding to a stimulus, and always acting from kindness

We are truly grateful for your support. Now, imagine with us 20 new Global Girls Communities sprinkled throughout Illinois, the United States, and the world each equipping girls with skills, mindsets and values including integrity, grit, kindness and curiosity. Now, imagine each of those girls teaching 20 other girls and so on and so one. We believe like sunflowers overtaking garden weeds, RARE will eventually become the norm.

This summer, 55 girls ranging in age from three to 14 learned RARE fundamentals along with dance and acting skills. They performed brilliantly before a standing room only audience of family and community members in our annual showcase. They even sang a song in Kiswahili taught by our summer guest from Tanzania.

We’re now partnering with other organizations in five different Illinois cities to bring girls together for our We Are One summit. The one-day gathering will focus on cultivating strengths and charting a path for grassroots strategies that will improve outcomes for girls everywhere.

In November, four members of the Global Girls team will travel to Tanzania to meet with our partners and plan a We Are One girls’ summit for that region.

There is a famous saying, “Behind every successful woman is tribe of other successful women who have her back.” Global Girls is proud to be a part of that growing tribe.

Links:

• "I like learning new dances."
• Peacemaking promo. When silence hurts.

• Youth Performance Camp Memory Book (PDF)
  

We hear it from school principals, teachers, community leaders and family members. We’ve seen it for ourselves working with youth in our after school and school-based programs. Too many youth are angry, anxious, confused or emotionally numb.

Global Girls has created a curriculum for a video we recorded several years ago. We’ll begin sharing both in workshops and trainings all over the country this fall. The goal is to begin open, honest conversations around the scenarios presented in the film and reach possible solutions with youth input to heal and grow.

Violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It doesn’t erupt in an instant. Small beginnings, microaggressions, can lead to disastrous endings leaving us asking “What happened?”.

Sexual violence impacts one in nine girls under the age of 18. One in five girls experience relational aggression or Mean Girl trauma. Cyberbullying has resulted in gang fights and even suicide

We believe that hearing from those impacted, girls can produce long-standing, positive results for everyone. If this initiative is successful, we will produce a series of videos that lead to conversation and healing.

Our peacemaking film was entered into several film festivals and has been accepted into 15 festivals. We’ve received five awards including  the Hometown Media Awards in the Underserved Voices Student category

See. Feel. Think. Talk. Create solutions. Together, we can interrupt the cycle of violence. Peacemaking, the video and curriculum is an essential tool.

Links:

• Peacemaking video