Girls Incorporated offers a unique and in-depth before/after school program and summer camp for over 400 girls ages 5-17 each year. The program is designed to maximize each girl’s potential through individualized mentoring, coaching, tutoring and through group participation in nationally-applauded curricula that help them develop positive character traits, learn healthy and fit lifestyles, and to excel academically. At Girls Inc. we know that learning does not end when the school dismissal bell rings, and we utilize the very special hours we have with each girl to their full potential. Our program is very intensive for each girl, who typically spends between 20-25 hours per week at Girls Inc. during the school year and 40 hours weekly in the summer.
Girls Inc. provides opportunities for girls which they have no where else. Specialized curricula help them learn how to be innovative thinkers, to explore creatively and scientifically, and our imaginative campus allows them a range of options for sports participation, artistic expression, and technology development. A small but skilled professional staff supervises all programs and develops close personal relationships with the girls and their families. Girls Inc. is a home away from home for our girls.
Girls Inc. programming is based on the premise that girls are entitled to out-of-school programs that are intentional and compensatory. This is language Girls Inc. has been using in its program development and training since the 1980’s. Intentional programs focus on the strengths and needs, interests and opinions of girls as they are today. Intentional programming goes beyond dropping in, hanging out, pick-up sports, one-day arts projects and recreation. Programs have goals and objectives attuned to the age and stage of development of the girls. The programs build from day to day or week to week so that the girls and adult facilitators bond as a group to achieve their goals. The result is change in positive directions in the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors of the girls. Intentional programs have opportunities for skill building, mastery, and ensuring that the girls have a sense of belonging, of physical and psychological safety, and emotional and social support and that they learn pro-social norms in contexts integrated with family, school and community.
The intent of the program at Girls Inc. is to prepare girls to be productive citizens by building their capacity for responsible and confident adulthood, economic independence and personal fulfillment. This is so because Girls Inc. programming assists girls in becoming economically literate, in exploring career options (including non-traditional careers with enhanced earning potential), in retaining their early interest in science and math, and in valuing themselves and exploring their full potential. These are critical areas for lessening truancy, dropping out, and otherwise prematurely truncating one’s adult levels of employability and ability to find and sustain employment that provides families with sufficient resources to prosper.
The notion that girls are entitled to compensatory programming is based on the premise that girls grow up in an inequitable world. Their society puts them in boxes by age, gender, race, culture, national origin, home language, sexuality, ability and disability, immigrant status, body size and shape, family composition and income and more—factors that often lead to discrimination and under-expectation. In an inequitable society, Girls Inc. philosophy argues, it is incumbent on out-of-school programs to compensate girls for the opportunities and encouragement they are not getting in the other institutions in their lives. Girls Inc. is not fixing girls; to the contrary, Girls Inc. is providing the opportunities girls deserve but routinely are denied or pushed out of in other family, school and community contexts.
|
