Girls Power Learning Institute
The Girls’ Power Learning Institute provides accompaniment to formal power holders on how to meaningfully build, support, and resource girls’ power.
Why Girls?
Girls everywhere deserve to live in freedom, safety and dignity. For too many girls this opportunity is thwarted. Simply being young and female places them at the very bottom of social hierarchy, making all girls vulnerable to violence and discrimination. The compounding effects of structural inequalities such as class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, and disability, work together to deepen exclusion and harm.
Marginalisation is the most pronounced for girls during their adolescent years, often resulting in withdrawal from or being pushed out of school, increased work burden, loss of peer support, increase in social isolation, pressure for early and forced marriage, and increased sexual violence.
However, this is not the end of the story. While we know girls face extreme vulnerabilities at the intersections of age and gender, we also know that they are immensely powerful, and they are not accepting this reality passively. They are pushing back in their homes, families, countries, and across the globe – actively working towards a world where this is no longer the status quo. Reclaiming of their rights and the protection that comes with knowing and understanding their power is an important route to creating real, embedded, long-term transformational change – for girls and for the world.
Why the Girls’ Power Learning Institute?
Girls are relevant to every issue, movement, and sector - humanitarian, climate, children’s rights, women’s rights, education, grassroots programming and grantmaking– and yet are too often invisible in programmes, policies, and funding strategies.
When girls are prioritised, most often it is within frameworks that disconnect them from their social and political context and ignore the systemic forces working to strip them of their innate power. As a result, funders, policy makers, and practitioners are missing out on a profound opportunity to support girls to build lives of safety, dignity, joy, and freedom – and to secure the broader social transformations that happen when girls are able to claim their power.
But another world is not only possible, we know how to get there. Over the past few years there have been a number of efforts to document the theory that underpins girls' power and resistance, and concrete strategies and practices on how to build and support it.
The Girls’ Power Learning Institute supports individuals, institutions, and networks across movements and sectors to transform their strategies and practices to better resource and support girls.
About Us
The Girls’ Power Learning Institute is an initiative sparked and facilitated by Our Collective Practice. Our Collective Practice was seeded in 2020, building on decades of direct work and organising with girls and young people, movement activism, and philanthropic advocacy. Bringing decades of experience and collaborating with strategic partners across every sector, the Girls’ Power Learning Institute provides relevant support for funders, practitioners and collaborators as they step into the girls’ space, or deepen their existing work.
Collaborators
With an understanding that sectors, movements and institutions have unique frameworks and priorities, we tailor our approach and engage in collaboration with practitioners, activists and experts to create a meaningful and impactful experience grounded in regional, political and thematic context.
Ayat Mneina
She/Her
Purity Kagwiria
She/Her
Dr. Tana Forrest
She/Her
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