Project Report
| Sep 10, 2021
We've Been Doing This Work for 7 YEARS!!!
Girls Council Members
It has been a journey, and just next month we are coming up to seven (7) years of existence as an organisation that has been serving girls, designing programmes for their needs and empowering them to thrive beyond their circumstances.
We feel like we've come full circle in our efforts, as we have even more girls who now work on our operations team, following being mentees, and we are super proud of them.
For us though, our work is now getting started. The next seven (7) years is the next chapter of our journey, where we aim to tackle:
- Strengthening our food security because hunger and lack of nutrition has a major impact on educational development;
- Strengthening our mental wellness and health support because your body and spirit can't function effectly without your mind;
- Expanding our safe-space services to include Emergency Housing for our mentees, because we want to ensure that if they ever run-away, are displaced, or homeless that there is somewhere where they can go;
- Increasing the Educational Capacity Building provided, from supplies, to books, to afterschool tutoring, to even aiding with coverage of tools needed to function, in a COVID-19 environment that demands online learning; and,
- Increasing our thematic offering for training to include Leadership and Personality Assessments, Financial Literacy, Digital Management, and Investment Planning because this next phase of our Strategic Plan is to advance our girls' mindset in being entrepreneurially minded, emotionally aware, forward-thinking, financial power-houses and personally sound leaders.
Until then, we want to ensure we share, what we have been up to in the past quarter or so, and how your funding has played a major role in our direct impact to the girls:
- Assisted in our continued support of 50 girls for food security through our monthly voucher drive, which provides girls with the nutrients they need for self-sustained growth and educational focus, hot meals on a more consistent basis and hygiene and feminine supplies, required for a well-balanced lifestyle, while simultaneously being empowered to cater for needs and wants in a self-sufficient manner.
- We were able to provide added support to 15 girls’ mental wellness and health through direct one-on-one engagement with a trained counsellor. Having someone to consistently engage with, outside of the home or school environment, that they trust and feel comfortable with, aids with the safe-space development we create. This particularly benefited girls facing increased poverty, loneliness, and abuse, due to COVID-19, and it ensured that girls could have an outlet to express themselves, while also getting the cognitive behavioural shifts that are needed to thrive.
- We have been able to contribute to the educational development of 25 girls through supplies that would aid directly with their school assignment, online school regime and enhancement of computer skills.
- Due to COVID-19 and the impact on our programming, different measures had to be introduced to facilitate all the protocols required to safely engage the girls. Some of these included continuing our contactless system of delivering programming tools to ensure that even in online sessions the girls still had everything they needed, snail mail postage to ensure that girls received vouchers to sustain their needs monthly, and pop-up drives that allowed for girls to still gain access to key educational supplies.
- In addition to supporting girls’ development through internal training and job placements, this funding has also allowed us to support girls who have been impacted, due to our hurricane season, as well. In one instant, we had to provide a portable 3-burner Stove Top, when their stove and oven was excessively damaged, and provide kitchen utensils which washed away during Hurricane Elsa.
We can't thank you enough for all your support, and also some who have left us messages of hope and encouragement have really been amazing, thank you!
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