REFLECTIONS FOUNDATION
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Mission Statement
Our mission is to create communication competencies that ensure the employability of young women in the future workplace.
About This Cause
Mission: Polished Pebbles creates communication competencies that ensure the employability of young women in the future workplace. In collaboration with schools and community partners who host our mentoring programs, our 500+ women volunteer mentors, and our wide range of corporate partners who provide job shadows and practice interviews each year to our high school girls, we help girls become great communicators at home, school and in the workplace, to positively resolve conflict, and avoid violent and disruptive behaviors. We serve more than 700 girls of color each year 80% Black, 20% Latina) at 40+ schools in the greater Chicago area. Need: Chicago’s Black girls are increasingly the victims of a wide range of violence. While much attention and aid has been given to low-income, urban black boys, adolescent Black girls who live in the same neighborhoods, witness and experience the same violence, and are victims of sexual violence, have been largely unaddressed. Sadly, we have witnessed how many young women are only equipped to use fighting and aggression as the primary means to resolve conflict. A similar challenge faced by Black girls is the combination of poverty in their communities, inadequate education, and a lack of access to employment opportunities as teens that leaves girls poorly prepared to enter higher education and the job market after high school graduation. Leadership: The inspiration for Polished Pebbles came when founder and Executive Director Kelly Fair observed young women at work discussing the celebrity abuse case between Chris Brown and Rihanna. She noticed that young women were internalizing negative media perceptions about black women and intimate partner violence. She responded by gathering young and adult women to have a discussion on the topic and reflect on how similar issues manifest in our communities. This first meeting, and the ones that followed, served as the basis for the creation of Polished Pebbles. Now, 15 years later, we convene a wide array of community, local business, non-for profit, corporate, civic, and government leaders and resources to meet the ever changing needs of urban Black girls. Purpose & Vision: Purpose: We fulfill our mission via our Polished Pebbles Girls Mentoring Program, through which we seek to replace the school-to-prison pipeline with a school-to-career pipeline for low-income African American and Latina girls. No other program for girls of color in Chicago combines our communications based Social Emotional Learning, career readiness, and career connections components. Through our school and community-based mentoring, social emotional skills training, and job-readiness and internship experiences, we address Chicago’s “other” crisis of violence against girls and provide girls with transferable skills to successfully resolve interpersonal conflict; overcome childhood trauma; and provide transferable skills, especially communication and work readiness skills, that allow girls to be less vulnerable to sexual violence and sex trafficking and be engages in school and graduate on time. Vision: PP seeks to eliminate the “hope gap” experienced by too many girls of color in Chicago. Our Every Girl is a CEO! curriculum introduces a myriad of new worlds to girls who rarely leave their neighborhoods. To us, success is a girl who not just attends school but who is engaged in school and taking leadership in her classroom, school, home, and community. A girl who sees the breadth of opportunities available to her in the future. A girl who lives in poverty who has learned about the career ladders in multiple industries and who is able to make an informed choice about how to best pursue a career that matches her interests and strengths. Success is a girl who knows how to resolve conflict and who can take the communication and soft skills they learn in our programs and apply them at home, work, and in her community. We are training the future leadership of corporate America, the nonprofit sector, and the civic sector. We are helping girls who are far too often trapped in a cycle of poverty and the criminal justice system to discover that they are entrepreneurs, scientists, CEO’s, managers, and leaders. Founded: 2009 Programs: The Polished Pebbles (PP) program has four key interlocking components: Core Polished Pebbles Girls Mentoring Program: Our signature in-school and after-school mentoring activities consists of 1 to 3 hours a week, engaging teen and tween Black and Latina girls at over 40 high need schools and several community sites in 2023. Our 10 week per semester, sequential, age-appropriate Social Emotional Learning centered, trauma informed, and communication focused college and career readiness programs are specifically designed to meet the unique needs of girls of color by of giving them the tools and skills they need to stay in school, engage in school, resolve conflict, take on leadership roles, and graduate high school. Every semester ends with a job shadow with a corporate partner, allowing girls to put their new skills into practice. Every Girl is a CEO! Curriculum: is an essential career and success guide written by Reflections Foundation Founder Kelly Fair. Ms. Fair illustrates each point -from how to get your first job, to how to find a mentor, to how to design a dream career -with examples of the lives of women of color who have achieved great success. Each summer, our jobs and internship component connects girls with paid employment, with this curriculum as the core of the weekly meeting for girls in our summer work programs. In 2023 we hired more than 160 girls into our Every Girls is a CEO! paid work program for 20 hours of work for 6 weeks in the summer. The curriculum is also used for the job readiness components in all of our core Polished Pebbles program. Pink Hard Hats: Girls in Trades Initiative: is a targeted program at Simeon High School and its feeder middle schools to connect girls to the wide variety of careers available in the skilled trades and construction industry. The program “pushes-in” to all of our PP school programs to connect every girl we engage in the Chicago region to opportunities and careers in the skilled trades. We partner with construction and engineering companies, industry groups, Chicago Women in Trades, unions, and large corporations such as Union Pacific and ComEd to turn our girls' dreams into careers and create a pipeline of young women of color for our partners. Mommy and Me Entrepreneurship Program: focuses on activities for moms and daughters to build bonds while working on communication and career skills together and provides mothers and their daughters the tools they need to turn their small business idea into a viable plan and working business. Supported by financial, business development and other mentors, mothers and girls prepare their business plan, secure seed money, and launch their business over the course of a year. We bring in mentors for the women and girls who align with their interests, include financial literacy components, and host an annual daylong Mommy and Me Career Conference. This is the only component that does not serve all girls in PP You can find us online on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/PolishedPebbles and Linkedn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/polished-pebbles .