Our Empower-a-Girl Program Model:
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Cultural Exchange
Sister-teams can communicate with each other through pen pal letter correspondence, emails, pictures, and videos. Sister-teams can also connect with the entire Girls Helping Girls community through internet message-boards on the Sisters 4 Peace networking website.
The Global Goals Curriculum that GHG provides features several platforms and exercises for sister-teams to discuss important issues as well as personal hobbies and interests. These exercises often serve as a starting point for sister-teams to begin to interact with one another.
During the first half of every program year, GHG additionally offers a Cultural Exchange Project that combines artwork and research to further engage the girls in communication. This project can be anything from making a mini-documentary about a day in the life of a girl in her country, to creating a tapestry of images with supporting written facts about the history, culture, and lifestyles of the girl’s country. These projects are an outlet for creative expression and more deeply stimulate awareness and compassion for global issues.
A Global Education
At the beginning of each program year in September, each sister-team in a pair receives the same curriculum guide focused on their assigned global goal. Each curriculum guide features five months’ worth of reflection exercises, activities, and background information for the girls to better understand and identify with their goal as it relates to both their local and their sister-team’s community.
Each of the four curriculum guides shares the first section, Month 1, which specifically discusses and contains activities for the importance of cultural exchange and building cross-cultural friendships. These activities are intended to familiarize girls with the process of cultural exchange and to support them in reaching out to their sister-team.
The curriculum for months 2 through 5 is unique to each global goal, and features about two activities, of less than two hours each, per month. In the Welcome Packet that GHG distributes to each sister-team, are included guidelines for the program, a description of the sister-team’s country and cultural context, and a timeline of set due dates for each month’s worth of activities.
Every month on the due date, when the GHG head office receives, through either email or postal mail, a copy of the finished activities for that month, within the next two weeks the appropriate activities or art creations are mailed to the group’s sister-team, while the other activities are reviewed and sent back to the group with questions and comments to further stimulate reflection and inquiry among the girls.
The goals of this curriculum are to:
- Educate girls about global issues and their reflection of the Millennium Development Goals
- Support girls in increasing their awareness and forming friendships unbound by cultural barriers
- Embolden girls to recognize their individual voice and united power to achieve global goals
Social Change Projects
At the beginning of the January of each program year, each sister-team receives a copy of GHG’s Transform Your World social change toolkit, which transports girls through a journey of 7 steps on how to dream, plan, and implement their own social change project addressing one aspect of their studied global goal. This toolkit will teach girls what social change is, how to create an action plan, how to fundraise, budget, plan events, and market their work, among many other skills.
By the end of May, both projects should have been completed. Teams will be asked to submit a reflection and will receive certificates in June.
Investment in Girls’ Initiative
GHG believes in a holistic education for all girls and therefore actively fundraises to support the girls’ livelihood in its international sites. It is critical that the girls possess books and school supplies, school infrastructural materials, scholarships for the most deserving, and of course, food, water, and clothing to mature with dignity and pursue their education, and thus be more empowered to create social change. GHG works to give them this power by fundraising to send those needed supplies.
Therefore, we ask each of our international sites to send us a list of needed supplies or materials, as well as the costs of an education and of these supplies in their location. Donors can designate if they would like to donate to a specific location or else we will use our own discretion based upon our site’s needs.
Although our philanthropic work is not our primary purpose or function, we deem it a crucial component of our program in order to truly and fully empower girls to become leaders and changemakers in their community.
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.
