I Am A Girl NGO
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Mission Statement
To inspire, empower, and provide opportunities with and for girls to lead, and create positive change, through a girl-led and girl-centred approach, that ensures girls feel powerful, proud, and protected.
About This Cause
We live in a predominantly black community yet more than 50% of the population is living in extreme poverty, even pre-COVID, most of whom are single parent homes, due to unemployment, underemployment and/or inherited debt, as a result of colonialism. More than 30% of the population in Barbados still utilise outdoor pit toilets, there is lack of running water supply within many homes, no electricity, school supplies and equipment or the internet, over-populated households, and no food. Girls are suffering through childhood in the territory which helped to shape the western slave trade, decades later, as they are ineffectively equipped and inadequately resourced to succeed. As such, we have designed our core programmes to aid in solving poverty and gender inequalities, which perpetuate violence, abuse and neglect and results in, e.g., self-harm, teen pregnancy and crime. I AM A GIRL NGO, formerly I Am A Girl Barbados, also referred to as ‘the Community’, developed, officially in 2014, as a holistic community modelled organisation based around the philosophy: ‘Reach One; Teach One’, which signifies that for every one (1) girl we reach, they in turn are urged to teach another. The purpose of the Community is to contribute to the continual progression of girls by providing opportunities for girls to be more empowered through their overall growth into adulthood with guidance and support, by aiding in their development of skills, education, leadership, awareness, social responsibility, career, and fellowship necessary to create positive change, not only within themselves but within their families and wider communities. The overall services offered are capacity building, community development, mentorship, and advocacy. Further to that, through our flagship programme, the Community utilises drama therapy and creative expression to shift negative cognitive behaviour patterns that are evident in girls aged five (5) to eighteen (18), while through Adopt-A-Girl, providing the necessary support required to thrive. Our unique methodology in programming aims to build trust, peer-to-peer community, and mentorship, with a combination of safe space intervention, tailored mental well-being programming and intimate girl-led hubs within rural and urban communities, as a non-invasive approach to cognitive behavioural support, while ensuring that those most vulnerable have access to resources for education, health and well-being and financial planning towards their goals. Our 5 key approaches that make us unique and disruptive include: -- Having a peer-to-peer model built into programming, that actively engages the leadership abilities of girls from a very young age. -- We work with and for girls, because this collaboration emphasises the fact that this work should not be done without girls at the centre of all steps towards their development. -- Our combination of creative expression and drama-therapy in programming is not executed, to our knowledge, within the Caribbean, and our proven results tells us that many other girls, with our support, could benefit tremendously. -- As the sole grass-roots entity working in real time to engage, empower and enhance our beneficiaries, our team also represents the girls we serve, from one of our first hires being a girl from our programmes, for example. -- Our methodology for capturing data during programming, to inform our advocacy, has also uncovered the mental well-being and tangible needs of girls through a feminist story-telling technique.