Launch Five Girls LitClubs For Literacy Worldwide

Hello Global Giving and LitWorld Community!

I am so excited to share an update about our LitClubs around the world. Thanks to your generosity, kindness and belief in the power of girls' stories to change our world, the LitWorld movement is experiencing tremendous momentum.

Our LitClubs are safe sanctuaries for girls to learn and to read and write, and to share their stories as a tool for becoming literate while building resilience. We specifically support "high risk/high potential" girls aged 10-14 because this is a crucial time of transition in their lives. This age is a time when many girls are forced to leave school to help with household chores and income generation or to be married and begin their own family. Once they are pulled from school the stories that they would have told are lost. However, with the support of a caring mentor, trusted group of friends and the chance to read and write powerful stories, this age can become a time of transformation, growth and empowerment. 

We are pleased to announce that in early 2014, LitClubs launched in Ahmedabad, India. Our partnership with an extraordinary local organization, the Center for Development (CfD), began last year and LitClubs currently serve two communities in Ahmedabad: Bombay Hotel and Piplaj. Bombay Hotel is made up of Muslim communities that settled there after 2002 when a large portion of the local Islamic population was killed. It is located by the gigantic municipal garbage dump, at least 15 stories high and 4 square kilometers in area. Piplaj is made up of Hindi communities that were displaced after a large riverfront beautification project commenced, sending residents of the permanent slum community there searching for a new home. 

These communities also face historical and ongoing tension between the Hindu and Muslim groups, and our LitClub mentors (called Bal Dosts) consciously incorporate religious co-existence into their work and create safe opportunities for girls and families to interact with peers from a different religious group.

Bombay Hotel and Piplaj are also very dangerous places to be a girl. There are strict rules for women and girls and because of this, joining a LitClub has offered the girls their first chance to play safely outside. Our Bal Dosts also say that the reading and writing activities, group discussions and community-building games that happen during LitClub sessions give girls a new avenue to express themselves through story, song and dance. More than that, it is the first time they are celebrated for having the courage to do so. 

We are now focusing on starting LitClubs in Zambia, Uganda, Cambodia and Egypt. We have been cultivating partnerships with local grassroots organizations in each of these countries and are training a new group of LitClub mentors who will soon start programs in their communities.

We know that girls everywhere are brilliant, and brimming with untapped potential. Often circumstances beyond their control limit their ability to become their best selves. Together we are intervening to make sure every girl has the right to be the author her own hopeful future. Because of this work we are seeing girls graduate from middle school, move on to secondary school and now attend college. The teen girls of our longest running LitClub in Harlem, New York City will graduate high school this year and many have already been accepted into their first choice colleges, including Wheaton and Brown. In Kibera and Kisumu, Kenya, our LitClub girls ranked at the top of their class in their KCPE exams, the standardized test that all students take to get into secondary school.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your generosity and for your belief in our work. Together we can make our fierce determination to expand our LitClub program around the world a reality.