2021-2022 Girls For A Change

Research Report in partnership with Ubuntu Research & Evaluation

2021-22 Evaluation Report

Girls For A Change's (GFAC) mission is to empower young women by inviting them to design, lead, fund and implement social change projects that tackle issues girls face in their own neighborhoods. GFAC programs are designed to provide consistent support to girls, from their youth into their young adulthood, and beyond - including middle and high school girls.

Through experiential learning and consistent exposure, GFAC aims to ensure girls are ahead of the learning curve, breaking cycles and closing the opportunity gaps faced by too many disadvantaged, marginalized or underrepresented girls — specifically Black girls. GFAC wants to give every girl* who aspires to get ahead a chance to be seen, heard and celebrated.

*While GFAC has chosen to focus on Black girls for the various reasons listed above, all girls are welcome to participate in our programs as our vision is for every girl to be seen, heard, and celebrated.

Therefore, the purpose of this evaluation was to understand the girl experience in Girls For A Change programming: Camp Diva, Girl Ambassadors, and Girl Action Team. This also included talking to the coaches and facilitators who lead the work. The key evaluation questions that guided this analysis were:

  • How do girls feel about the overall Girls For A Change experience?
  • What are the most impactful aspects in each Girls For A Change program?
  • Why do girls continue onto the next phase of the Girls For A Change program?

UBUNTU Research and Evaluation is a team of unapologetic Black women, femmes, and non-binary people working as transdisciplinary strategists committed to disrupting systemic oppression. We educate, facilitate, and evaluate with an explicit focus on race and its intersections with other marginalized identities, including but not limited to gender, sexuality, class, and ability. As strategists, our work is grounded in three core ideas:

  1. We use dignity as our framework. Dignity helps us to better understand the relationships between inequities and solutions. We have developed key concepts of dignity that manifest in our organizational lives that we identify, understand and strategize our work through. 
  2. We position equity as a step, not a goal or destination. We hold freedom and liberation values close to our work. We contextualize our work to understand oppression, especially racial oppression, as complex and multifaceted. Freedom and liberation requires a whole new system of social organization to emerge. Equity is a step towards engaging that process, but it is not our final destination. We commit to the ongoing work and setting the pace with organizations to embark in an on-going iterative unlearning and re-contextualizing process.
  3. We hold beloved community as the foundation for creating sustainable organizational equity-based change. As a consequence, we hold ourselves accountable to practicing beloved community within our team and through our work with other organizations. We reference and revisit the work of bell hooks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to mentor our work. We acknowledge that there are no race neutral situations and we bring the expertise to identify race puzzles in your organization to facilitate learning and growth opportunities across the organization.