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.
Building Girls Power Institute Learning Booklets
The Girls’ Power Learning Institute learning booklets and shared language glossary are key resources designed to support individuals, institutions, and networks across movements and sectors to transform their strategies and practices to better resource and support girls.
BOOKLET 1
Girls and Girlhood: Resisting, Building, and Dreaming New Worlds
A deep dive into the why, what, and how of girls’ resistance, dreaming, and power. This booklet includes examples of building power, how girls and young feminists are organising, and some of the factors girls and young feminists contend with in their work and organising.
BOOKLET 2
Girls and Young Feminists: Sparking, Leading, and Organising Across Social Movements
Sheds light on some of the contributions girls and young feminists have made to social change by documenting case studies of specific movements and highlighting where girls and young feminists have played a key role in making specific advancements. This booklet also highlights the specific roles, strategies, and impact of girls and young feminists in dismantling oppressive structures to bring about systemic change.
BOOKLET 3
Resourcing Girls and Young Feminists: Analysis of the Context, Approaches, and Practices
Provides an understanding of philanthropy and the current state of funding for girls and young feminists, while highlighting key recommendations and best practices for effectively resourcing them. This booklet moves from understanding the contributions of girls and young feminists in social change to providing more and better resources to their efforts.
Acknowledgments
The Girls Power Learning Institute Booklets where developed in 2025 with the foundational collection and analysis provided by the Stories of Girls’ Resistance. Co-written by Dr. Tana Forrest, Juliana Román Lozano, Ayat Mneina, Jody Myrum, and Laura Vergara. Peer reviewed and contributions by Anna Windsor, Ayat Mneina, Boikanyo Modungwa, Juliana Vélez, and Priyanka Samy. Copyedited by Rasmieyh Abdelnabi. Designed by Alike Creative with artwork from Shreya Gupta and Vidushi Yadav.
Ecosystems Strengthening
The Ecosystems Strengthening tools and insights brings together core resources to advance collective resilience and coordinated action with and for girls and young feminists. It offers shared analysis, practical guidance, and advocacy pathways to support collective efforts for a just and democratic world.
Acknowledgments
The Ecosystem Strengthening series is grounded in decades of knowledge generated by activists, practitioners, funders, and girls and young feminists—particularly from the Global Majority. The insights and recommendations offered in these resources do not reflect a single voice or institution, but rather a shared understanding of what it will take to build and sustain thriving ecosystems for and with girls and young feminists worldwide. Specific curators and contributors are acknowledged within each specific resource.
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.
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