Empowering Girls through Policy

For twenty-five years, Girls Empowerment Network has been helping young women across Texas discover that they are unstoppable. They have done so by laser-focusing their curriculum on one critical component: building self-efficacy, which is a girl’s belief in her ability to succeed. On this episode of the Into the Fold, we are joined by Vanessa Beltran, newly hired Mental Health Policy Fellow for Girls Empowerment Network, and her policy mentor Dr. Sarah Miller-Fellows, Director of Impact, to discuss challenges facing girls and how self-efficacy helps young leaders advocate for themselves and their communities.

Building Self-Efficacy through an Advocacy Framework

In 1996, group of Texas parents to come together and founded Girls Empowerment Network – originally called The Ophelia Project, inspired by the book Reviving Ophelia. The organization has impacted the lives of more than 15,000 girls and their families each year through their summer camps, school-based programs, conferences, and now, virtual programming and activity kits.

The Girls Empowerment Network uses an advocacy framework to support their self-efficacy curriculum. One of the key features of this framework is the concept of the “Six Cs.” These Six Cs are Confidence, Coping Skills, Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, and Creativity. When girls put these Six Cs into practice, the impact is clear. Just one example resulted from a program called “Coping and Connection.” After surveying over 200 parents of girls during the pandemic who had previously gone through Girls Empowerment programming, Sarah and Vanessa saw that while there were incredible amounts of stress in these girl’s lives, there were also incredible examples of resilience. “They said that when they were stressed out, they used breathing exercises that they learned in their programs,” says Sarah. “When they were upset about not being able to see their friends every day, they were using coloring pages or doing some of the yoga poses that they had been taught.”

Sparking Change at Home and in Communities

Still, like so many during this pandemic, girls and their parents also reported struggling with unreliable Internet connections, making virtual classes difficult to attend. “They and their parents really wanted opportunities for peer connection and creativity, which resulted in the creation of the Spark Kit,” Sarah explains. The Spark Kits, now in their fourth iteration called the “Unstoppable Activist Spark Kit,” are designed for young girls and their families to explore and communicate their values and identities through at-home activities. “Really the goal of these Spark Kits is to help girls develop a critical self-awareness and gain confidence in their ability to exercise leadership,” says Vanessa, “As well as apply these key decision-making skills to generating progress on real world issues that they identify as affecting their communities.”

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