Our Mission:
Girls Helping Girls is an international nonprofit organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area that partners girls in the United States with girls in schools and community organizations in developing countries to jointly identify problems in their communities and develop social change through micro lending projects to address those issues.
The mission of Girls Helping Girls is to build a global culture of girls consciously collaborating to make a difference. We strive not only to bridge international cultures but, more profoundly, to channel the power harvested from the girls' collaborative service projects to Eradicate Poverty, Increase Access to Education, Improve Health, and – most importantly – Promote Peace.
Statistics show that 94% of youth in America feel powerless to make a difference, while in the San Francisco region alone, one-third of girls report feeling helpless and depressed. GHG works to reverse this trend by teaching girls to value their identities and find strength in one other. GHG not only empowers girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to stand tall and assert their voice, but it also educates them to value cultural diversity.
This is our mission.
Please visit our Program pages to learn more about how we accomplish this mission.
Our Core Values:
Together with our mission, Girls Helping Girls possesses a set of values that we consult in all of our programs and partnerships. These core principles are integral to our infrastructure and execution and inform and guide our decisions as much as our mission.
Youth Leadership- It is a well-known and now rather trite adage that youth are the leaders of tomorrow. We declare, however, that youth are the leaders of today too- we must only recognize and cultivate their leadership. It is significant for youths to recognize this ability themselves and for adults to encourage and celebrate it. Latent youth leaders only require mentorship and guidance, and they will blossom.
Cross-Cultural Collaboration- By uniting girls around the world to identify and confront universal issues, we hope to kindle a global revolution that democratizes the quest for peace worldwide. We can only accomplish this goal, however, by emphasizing commonalities over differences and opening dialogue between disparate ways of life to foster understanding and respect.
Change through Education- In any endeavor, education is always cardinal to success. In order for girls to understand and appreciate the variety and complexity of problems that face our earth—and their potential for solving them—they must first learn about these challenges and different cultures’ and regions’ methods of response. After we inform them and cultivate an interest in confronting these major issues, Girls Helping Girls will translate that passion into action by giving them the tools and resources they need to innovate solutions.
Girl Empowerment: Empower a girl, Empower Her nation- Girls Helping Girls strives to pioneer with its work a gradual transformation in the way not only society but girls themselves view their potential for forging change through service and cross-cultural dialogue. Through our work, we have realized how crucial girl empowerment is to world peace, for if girls around the world only recognized their common hardships- and collaborated to address those issues- we could create a fraternity of common minds teaching and helping each other to make the world a better place. This is an indispensable component of our mission.
Women are 51% of humankind, empowering them will change everything… I can promise you that women working together linked, informed, and educated can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.
