"I want every girl to know that her voice can change the world": An interview with Girls Empowerment Network

We spoke with Ami Kane, Deputy Director at the Girls Empowerment Network, to discuss how the Spark Change Project is empowering girls to become advocates for the issues that matter the most to them and strengthening critical supports for their students with help from the New York Life Foundation’s Aim High grant program. Aim High grants are awarded to afterschool, summer, or expanded learning programs that help economically disadvantaged middle school students successfully transition to high school. Research has shown that for disadvantaged students, more learning time in the form of high-quality afterschool, expanded-day, and summer programs leads to greater achievement, better school attendance, and more engaged students. The Girls Empowerment Network was one of the 36 grantees of the 2021 Aim High awards program.

What is the Spark Change Project?

Our project is the Spark Change Project, and it is delivered in a strategic collaboration with the Excellence and Advancement Foundation. The Spark Change Project's mission is to center girls of color as leaders in advocacy, who discover their activist voices, and galvanize their peers to engage in their own passions for positive social change.

For the team of paid Peer Facilitators who help design and run the program, this opportunity helps them see themselves in this field in the future and gather those personal references and experiences that we hope will enrich their professional paths for years to come. When younger girls come into the program, they see someone that looks just like them that is in charge and leading the programming. They don’t have to wait until they are much older or have special training. Their ideas and views are valid and worthy of being heard exactly as they are.

What difference has the Aim High grant made in your program?

The grant was able to go towards our Peer Facilitators, the teen girls of color who become the heart and the soul of the Spark Change Project. The idea behind this program is that we want to give girls of color the opportunity to have a platform and receive training to analyze their community needs and advocate to decision makers in all different spaces. The adult staff become the trainers and the support for introducing these Peer Facilitators into the realm of policy and advocacy, but it is those peer facilitators that actually take the microphone to share out their ideas. The Aim High grant helped us pay these girls for their time in this professional role. The grant went towards our second cohort of teen girls who stepped into those roles and were able to work 5-10 hours a week. We match them to female mentors of color and help them build confidence for them to then turn towards their peers and become that key mentor for others.

For us to be able to pay these teen girls for their ideas and for their leadership helps create that strong commitment on their part and makes it feasible for them to participate in this program. Otherwise, many of these girls would need to have a part-time job—for them to be working in the non-profit space, aligned directly with their passions, is a game-changer.

What are your takeaways from serving these youth with help from the Aim High grant?

Girls are ready to lead. We do an activity called Power Chats, which are designed to put girls into small groups and make it much less intimidating to talk to elected officials, policymakers, and local leaders. Often, one of the Peer Facilitators will sit with a group of younger girls and make sure everyone is comfortable having those conversations. What blew us away was that we saw so many of the younger girls jumping in and participating. They showed us that girls are very interested in being listened to when that space is created for them.

How can youth serving organizations better amplify youth voice?

We have multiple ongoing ways that youth can get involved in the organization, whether informal or formal. We established a Youth Ambassador Council where we create a formal space for youth to help us be the best and most accessible program we can be. This gives them the chance to apply their leadership skills and make a real impact in their organization. When we have big questions about the organization, plans for the future, or strategic planning, we ask our students directly. Our Program Department asks the girls directly about what is most important to them and what matters to them when they are in the program. This may seem very simple, but it is very important for us to not lose that connection to our youth.

What challenges are you seeing amongst your students right now?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), adolescent girls are in a particular mental health crisis right now. We realize this from the data, but also from being in direct service to these adolescent youth every day. Girls who spent their middle school transition years in the virtual space are returning to in-person learning and all of the challenges they face are amplified. For example, I have had parents and staff share that some girls were experiencing bullying amongst their peers when they returned to in-person learning because they had only been seen from the shoulders up for a year. Their bodies had changed, their bodies had done a very natural thing during that time—but these types of negative comments hit adolescent girls in an extremely difficult way. There hasn’t been a generation before that has experienced this kind of situation.

Between the sadness, the disconnect, and the big feelings, there have been a lot more requests for the services we provide. There has never been a time where we’ve felt that supports for adolescent girls are so strongly needed.

How are you meeting these needs?

Girls are constantly trying to understand and balance the messages they hear from the news, their schools, their parents, and their peers. I am very proud that my colleagues in the Program Department are able to create spaces where girls are allowed to freely process these things and that this is something that we’re able to offer. One of our areas of expertise is around coping skills, whether it’s a breathing exercise or mindfulness and meditation.

Stress management does feel like our biggest need. Our current curriculum is a 20-module curriculum and some of the modules are entirely around self-care and stress management. But I know that isn’t going to be enough, so we were thinking about how we can offer a new spin on a coping skill or self-care activity. No matter what we learn that week, our girls would still get those tools in their toolkit.

What are the most important things youth serving organizations can do right now for youth?

The isolation and disconnect that is occurring right now is disproportionately impacting girls, but it is also impacting all students. It has never been more important to allow every youth the space to talk about their feelings. So many out-of-school time partners, including the Girls Empowerment Network, focus on those skills. The more we tend to every student’s social emotional health, the stronger long-term outcomes they are going to have. All of us in youth services have a big charge in front of us to meet that need.

What are you looking forward to in your program?

For the Spark Change project, we are very excited to launch our 2023 legislative year. In Texas, the legislature meets every other year, so only in those years do our girls work on their state level policy work and see what policies are coming through that are relevant to them. In 2021, one of our girls was able to testify to the education subcommittee in favor of expanding mental health supports, increasing funding for mental health professionals in schools, and training teachers to identify mental health challenges in youth.

When I think about getting our third cohort of peer facilitators and preparing them to speak about what matters to them, we get so excited to imagine what that will look like. The girls get to share out what matters to them, from access to menstrual products to supports for youth experiencing homelessness.

Do you have any final thoughts?

We are excited to see our services grow. For example, in our school-based program, Girl Connect, we are going to be reaching 2,000 girls in weekly, out-of-school time programming statewide this year, compared to 1,000 to 1,500 girls served on average in previous years. We are also hiring new team members to help deliver this programming. I can’t wait to see how this school year unfolds. It is very important timing where we are able to be responsive in a much larger bandwidth at the same time that it feels like the needs are so much larger.

Learn more about the Girls Empowerment Network and the Spark Change Project. To learn more about the Aim High program and see more spotlights on Aim High grantees, check out the Afterschool Awards page.