Introduction
Project Like A Girl began as a Community Change Initiative, with a group of six PLPers, and was carried on another year by Dajah Brooks, Tia Polite, and Lilli Stone. We designed a curriculum for women’s empowerment that is available on our website and published on Amazon, and we taught these eleven lessons to a group of girls at Thomas Jefferson High School. Thanks to the Passport Fund and various other organizations on campus and in the community, our project was a transformative experience for our team and our mentees. Thank you to everyone who helped make Project Like A Girl possible and so successful!
All-Girl Spaces
When our team first began discussing the vast issue of gender inequality for women, trying to determine what we could possibly do to make a positive change, we reflected on our own experiences in middle and high school. We all shared feelings of insecurity, especially because of a habit of comparing our younger selves to other young girls. The detrimental effect of unhealthy comparisons and unhealthy competition was also reiterated in the research we found and recounts from other women. The all-girl space is an essential component of our project because it mitigates the unhealthy competition between girls. In all-girl spaces, girls are liberated from the prioritization of boys and allow girls to develop empathy for each other through shared experiences. All-girl spaces foster friendship and trust and create an environment for learning and growth.
One of the girls we taught and mentored in the group from Thomas Jefferson High School told us, “I really loved this program! I was surprised by how comfortable I felt I could be with everyone. We were able to discuss topics very openly and in a way that was empowering which changed my perspective on a lot of topics.” This quote indicates that the all-girl space was successful in fostering comfort, trust, and empathy between girls, and that this comfort allowed for learning to take place. The all-girl space is cultivated collectively and, in our experience, contributed to true growth.
Mentorship
Toward the beginning of Project Like a Girl, we knew we wanted mentorship to be a central aspect of the project. We had learned from our research that all-female spaces are empowering in a powerful way, and separately we had observed the research on mentorship across a diverse array of spaces and thought, why not combine these two principles? We began with a three-tiered mentorship model, where middle schoolers would be mentored by high schoolers and high schoolers would be co-facilitating the curriculum while being mentored by us as college students, all while learning the same material. This idea was interrupted by the pandemic, so we found community partners at Thomas Jefferson High School and implemented the curriculum under a two-tiered mentorship model.
The impact of mentorship in this space took form as an overwhelming vulnerability among members of the group surrounding difficult topics and we could not have done this without establishing ourselves as mentors and inviting the girls to confide in us as such. Looking back on our time with the group at Thomas Jefferson, we felt this idea of reciprocity mentorship. While we were in the “mentor” role, we recognized how much we had gained from our mentees throughout the time we spent with them. In serving in this role we had learned a lot about ourselves and what we had to offer other girls based on our experiences as female-identifying individuals who at one point were in their shoes.
Curriculum Development
Beginning in Fall 2019, the original idea for our project, which began as a Community Change Initiative, was to teach a comprehensive, holistic, and empowering sexual health curriculum to a group of high school girl-identifying students, who would then teach it to a group of middle schoolers. A stakeholder we met with early on, Meredith Morrison with the Empowerment Project, had a similar goal of empowering women through sexual health education, and she pointed us to SmartGirls™ Life Skills Training. This curriculum was created by Guillford county in North Carolina. In the Spring quarter, the pandemic began and we were not able to teach the curriculum as we had intended, so we pivoted and focused our energies instead on beginning to revise the curriculum. These revisions were minor, and we sought feedback on the complete curriculum from Meredith Morrison and Kristen Kennedy, a local fifth-grade teacher, which was very insightful. We were able to teach one lesson to a small group of middle school girls via zoom. The girls indicated they learned quite a bit in that short time and appreciated being able to engage with their peers in a positive and educational environment. We felt this lesson was successful considering the circumstances, and it inspired us to see what we could accomplish with more time.
With the start of the 2020 school year, we committed to completely overhaul and revitalize the SmartGirls™ curriculum. We recognized that major content revisions needed to be made, because SmartGirls™ is abstinence-based, and according to our research states with an abstinence-based curriculum have a high correlation with teen pregnancy. We have found a focus on abstinence to be otherwise ineffective and stigmatizing, therefore falling short of our goal of empowerment. We re-worded and re-structured the majority of the discussions and activities to shift the focus onto values, and re-ordered the existing lessons so that the first five lessons emphasize reflecting on the girls’ individual values and identities. The importance of this change is that neither the curriculum nor the facilitators are influencing the girls or telling them what decisions they ought to make with their lives; the discussions are open for the girls to make the decisions that best resonate with them as individuals. With the discussion of identities, we recognized that none of the lessons addressed important factors of gender, sexuality, race, religion, or class. We determined this to be essential to the safety of the space and the effectiveness of the curriculum, so we collaborated with DU’s Queer Student Alliance to create a new lesson. We also utilized activities from The Safe Zone Project Curriculum that unpack the privilege in our identities. Furthermore, we used The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color by Virgie Tovar, integrating several activities and passages throughout the lessons to acknowledge how racism, colorism, fatphobia, homophobia, and heteronormativity, as well as the social and institutional forces that perpetuate these forms of discrimination, hinder our empowerment as girl-identifying individuals.
From January through March, we were able to teach our curriculum to a group of girls at Thomas Jefferson High School. We supplemented our curriculum with copies of The Self-Love Revolution for each of the girls and referred them to chapters for further learning after the lessons. Before every session, we revised the lesson based on our growing experience teaching this age group and our familiarity with the individual needs and interests of the girls in our group. For the lesson dedicated to sexual health, we reached out to BC4U, and Kate Leonard, a nurse practitioner and professional sexual health educator, co-facilitated this lesson with us. In addition, we reached out to Virgie Tovar, the author of The Self-Love Revolution, who co-facilitated our lesson on body positivity and how to navigate the media.
After completing the program with Thomas Jefferson High School, we continued revisions based on what we learned from teaching it and created a polished, well-formatted final version, with extensive instruction for facilitators. Each lesson in our final version contains objectives, an icebreaker activity, discussions, activities, a weekly wrap-up tradition, an email for parents, and links to several external resources. The lessons cover self-esteem, decision-making, being assertive and resisting peer pressure, mental health, the physical and emotional effects of puberty, sexual health and consent, navigating relationships, identities, body positivity, and navigating the media. We relied on the expertise of various organizations and existing curriculums as well as scholarly research and designed it to be inclusive, comprehensive, holistic, and above all empowering. Like A Girl: An Empowerment Curriculum is available for free on our website: https://www.projectlikeagirl.com/the-grades and available for purchase on amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/Project-Like-Girl-Empowerment-Curriculum/dp/B095GJW4KV/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1623278744&refinements=p_27%3ALillian+Stone&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Lillian+Stone.
Impact
How do we define impact? Our ability through our interactions or our curriculum to create confidence and space for at least one girl is our definition of impact. The impact of Project Like A Girl can be seen through a multifaceted approach.
Our first impact is ourselves. As will be mentioned in the Personal Growth section, we all changed, grew, and learned so much more about ourselves, and gained the confidence that we did not even know that we needed. At such an integral point in all of our lives, Project Like A Girl had such a large impact on our own personal lives.
Our next impact was on the girls. The girls that we had the amazing opportunity to teach at Thomas Jefferson had a visible change. They all came slightly more into the person that they were supposed to be. At the end of our time with them, they expressed how important and how the program had such a large impact on them. That was why we made the program in the beginning.
Our last visible impact was the community. We have been able to bring community awareness to an issue that is typically not brought up, create an all-inclusive, all-girls space, and educate not only ourselves but the community as a whole on what it meant to be a confidently empowered woman.
Sustainability
Our initial idea was to form a three-tiered mentorship program connecting middle school, high school, and college girls to one another so that they have a mentor throughout their educational and personal journey. In all of our experience, mentorship played such an important part in each of our times to become the individuals we are today, and we wanted to be able to provide that sense of security to other girls.
However, COVID-19 hit, and our stakeholders had to pull out due to the inability to invest the time and resources into what it would have taken to make the type of afterschool program we were hoping to create. Our team was devastated. We did not know what to do. We had already purchased the SmartGirls™ curriculum to implement, so we had the idea to create our own curriculum.
Very soon after we began thoroughly reading over the SmartGirls™ and realized how unrealistic it was for a girl in 2020, we began our own curriculum, which is detailed above. For almost 6 months, we created a curriculum that we thought was everything that we never received in a health education class.
November 2020, we were finishing up our curriculum and had no clue how to make our project sustainable as we no longer had the school stakeholders we had before. Thomas Jefferson High School miraculously emailed us asking to teach the curriculum. We were thrilled that the project was going to continue on.
Upon completion of teaching the curriculum of the Winter Quarter of 2021, we decided we wanted to make the curriculum available to as many people as possible. We published our curriculum on Amazon under the title of Project Like A Girl: An Empowerment Curriculum. To ensure that financial accessibility would not be an issue, we have all of the materials available for free download on our website. As we continue on with our journeys, our sustainability goal is to continue to ensure there is always the ability to access the curriculum for parents and guardians, educators, peers, and all other individuals who have the ability to access and teach the curriculum. We are also working with a couple of the girls at Thomas Jefferson to make the program a club that will be available for the next school year!
Personal Growth
Since the fall of 2019, we have been on this journey with Project Like a Girl. When we first began, we connected because of a similar intent to impact young girls at a difficult stage of their lives. With this intention, we landed on providing support through education and encouragement of habitual practices that would stay with the girls for a lifetime. We recognized a need for this curriculum, first, from our own experiences as girls in middle and high school, who, at the time, did not have this kind of support in the sexual education curriculum in our own schools, and next, from the lack of inclusive and modern resources we were looking at online.
After forming a more solid idea for our project, we began our research. This research and development process allowed us to gain incredible insight on topics that are important to us. We found ourselves using this knowledge in our daily lives to educate others and contribute more efficiently to conversations about female empowerment.
When the curriculum writing stage began, we gained an entirely new set of skills. After inviting community partners to review our curriculum time and time again, we edited in great detail and found gaps in our curriculum that were unacceptable to our standards. We landed in a place where we felt comfortable teaching the curriculum to the group of students at Thomas Jefferson High School, and diving into the curriculum with them, realized there was much more editing necessary to make the curriculum easily facilitated by others. We went back each week prior to meeting with the group to do further editing and finalizing, and have now arrived at a comprehensive curriculum that we are proud of. We learned through this process that regarding projects on this scale, we must do everything in our power to ensure that the material has a positive outcome and is not damaging due to carelessness.
We are proud of our personal growth as leaders, mentors, and authors of a curriculum that we believe is uniquely comprehensive, inclusive, and specified to an age group that is vulnerable and often faced with unique challenges that should be addressed by the mentors in their lives.
Acknowledgments
Being able to work together as a team for this project we are so incredibly passionate about for the past two years has been an honor, and there are so many people we would like to thank. First and foremost, thank you to our families for instilling us with the values of empathy, empowerment, and service, as well as the strength of tenacity, innovation, and courage. Thank you to Zoi Johns, Jackson Garske, and Kassidy Patarino who have participated on our team and helped develop the project immeasurably! A big thanks to Trisha Teig, who has been our team coach throughout the Project’s entirety, and Nicole Cozzi, who has supported us in every way.
We are forever thankful for Emily Lupo, who helped us make Project Like A Girl an extracurricular group at Thomas Jefferson High School, and introduced us to our group of phenomenal girls. Thank you to Virgie Tovar, Meredith Morrison, Kristen Kennedy, and Anne Myers. Our project could not have been so successful without the support of these organizations: the PLP Passport Fund and DU Grand Challenges for providing us with funding, SmartGirls™ Life Skills Training, The Safe Zone Project, and BC4U.
Thank you, most of all, to our group of girls at Thomas Jefferson High School, who inspired us every week with their courage and vulnerability, unapologetic individuality, resilience, and unbelievable kindness. They have all changed our lives forever. Like a girl!
Thank you,
Project Like A Girl
Dajah Brooks, Tia Polite, Lilli Stone
The PLP Way 