Leadership and Community Action

Girls Inc. Leadership and Community ActionSM

Throughout history, women and girls have blazed pathways to progress and change.Girls and women have always been leaders, but their leadership has often gone unrecognized. To address this problem and to inspire girls to become leaders, Girls Inc. has developed this program to bring girls and adult women together to discover the power of their capacity for leadership through community action.

Girls build their leadership skills and create lasting social change through community action projects. In DiscoverySM, girls ages 9 to 11 celebrate the heritage of girls and women as leaders and develop awareness of themselves as community resources and trustees of the common good. In In Our Own Hands® , girl ages 12 to 14 deepen their understanding of girls and women as social change agents and of leadership as a collective process grounded in belonging to and having responsibility for one's community.

DiscoverySM

This component enables girls to join in partnership with women leaders in their community to develop and practice leadership and advocacy skills and construct community action projects. One of the principal strengths of this component is the opportunity it provides girls to make decisions, take responsibility, and initiate projects in collaboration with experienced women. Indeed, girls have been involved in the development of the program from its initial stages.

In Discovery, girls and women come together to celebrate their heritage as leaders. They discover their own leadership skills through hands-on activities, role plays, community exploration, and a weekend retreat. Together, girls and women identify issues of ongoing concern to the community and formulate responses using persuasive communication and organizing for action. From removing graffiti to getting a stop sign placed at a dangerous corner to enhancing community awareness of the dangers of drugs and violence—Discovery empowers girls, enriches their communities, and enables them to explore their own ability and responsibility to produce positive long-term social change.

Results

Girls Incorporated affiliates embrace the Discovery principles that help girls and women develop lifelong skills and confidence to bring about change. Through the pilot phase and since then, hundreds of girls have put leadership into practice through the design and implementation of community action projects created in collaboration with women partners. In Minneapolis, Discovery partners planned a personal meeting with the mayor to discuss community safety. In Denver, the program helped reinforce girls' essential role in the city's youth development campaign. Consequently, Girls Inc. of Metro Denver was invited to work closely with local schools and the Denver Housing and Urban Development agency to provide the program on an outreach basis to more girls. These action projects provide long-lasting benefits to communities, and to the girls and women who work together to discover their power to make positive change.

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