Empower Her is a cross-generational project introduced by Taghyeer Organization that aims at empowering teenage girls our of our belief in teenage girls’ abilities in solving challenges.
The girls will be assigned young mentors who are still in the beginning of their careers who would help them with the projects. Those young mentors also have advisers who have longer experience in life to help them out with this project and in life.
The project started in summer 2014 and will be replicated every summer. Empower Her is funded by LitWorld and is part of the 10000 Girls Initiative.
Steps:
1- Kick off meeting where the girls meet, discuss what challenges they’d like to tackle, they are divided into groups, each groups chooses a challenge to tackle. Each group has ten days to write a proposal that shows how the girls will solve this challenge. Each group will be assigned a mentor who will help the girls, answer their questions and support them.
2- After ten days the girls meet again to present their proposals. Voting takes place by the girls themselves and a committee of advisers. Winning project has up to JOD 1000 to implement their project.
3- The girls have from 30-40 days to implement the steps they proposed and they are asked to hand in technical and financial reports every week that show their progress. At the end of this period, the girls have to do a final presentation on what they have accomplished.
2014 Winning Projects:
1- My language is my Identity: The girls chose to tackle the challenge of the young Arab generation not taking pride of their Arabic language. They have deigned tshirts with slogans that encourage youth to use Arabic in their daily life. The tshirts were sold in Jara flee market in Amman.
2- My Garden is my Right: Those girls have chosen to reinnovate a public park as we in Jordan suffer from lack of public parks. They have chosen to paint the old swings and see-saws, to clean the park and to hold read aloud sessions to encourage the children in the neighborhood to visit the park.
Next steps:
Until summer 2015 where the summer 2014 program will be repeated after being adapted according to lessons learned, we are hosting a series of events for the girls to broaden their perspectives, answer their questions and help them better tackle their own challenges. They meet once every two months with a speaker who will talk to them about topics they are interested in such as courage and discrimination against women.
