Girls and Leadership Service-Learning Proposal

Contact Information

Samantha Daley:

Rachel Miles:

Emily Vrotsos: 

Community Partner

Community Partner: Young Women Leaders Program
Address: 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL 32816
Contact: 407-823-6502
Mission Statement: “The Young Women Leaders Program is a mentoring program sponsored by the UCF Women’s Studies Program . . . YWLP promotes middle school girls’ leadership abilities, pairing collegiate women with middle school girls. In mentoring pairs and small groups of Big and Little Sisters, participants focus on learning competence and autonomy, independent thinking, empowerment, self-esteem, and encouraging girls to think about their futures.” (http://womensstudies.cah.ucf.edu/ywlp/)

Community Needs: Members of the YWLP will benefit from extra assistance organizing and running alumni events and UCF day in the form of running lesson plans and engaging the girls in activities that encourage and acknowledge how they are leaders in their everyday lives.

Proposal

Currently, youth leadership in general is highly undervalued in American society. While this holds true and complicates the leadership efforts of adolescents in general, it is especially relevant in considering girls’ leadership. Apart from its potential long-term effects on the emergence of future women leaders, this difficulty also has more immediate short-term effects. As part of working with YWLP our project will address much the same need. In response to the specific needs we have so far seen demonstrated by this semester’s group of little sisters, we have shifted the focus of our work with the girls to more effectively address bullying. We hope to support the girls in exploring ways to respond to bullying (including cyber-bullying) of themselves and others, and possible ways to creatively raise others’ awareness of the bullying problem, on- and offline.

Throughout the semester the YWLP big sisters will facilitate the creation of a teen magazine (’zine) which will be created entirely by the little sisters. The major theme of our service learning is showing the adolescent girls of the program that the internet is not a place to be feared, but an avenue to utilize and express their opinions and individuality. To this end, we will be creating a Twitter where we will post tweets that the girls came up with. A topic that we will place special emphasis on is bullying and the impact that it has on the girls in their everyday lives. We will identify ways to stop and prevent bullying from a bystander as well as a first person standpoint. We will incorporate cyber bullying and emphasize this in the use of the twitter. The big sisters will monitor the twitter, but all content enclosed within will be from the little sisters.  Our plan this semester is also to have the girls create a video showing what they do in YWLP, on effective ways to prevent certain issues like bullying and why the girls in the program really benefit from having big sister mentors. A scrapbook will also be created to culminate some of the experiences of the big and little sisters throughout the course of the program.

Rationale

By enabling the girls to express themselves through print and online, we wish to break the stereotypic ideal that girls are endangered and must be nurtured and protected as they were described in the United Nations Fourth World Conference. The girl is not seen as a separate group of individuals and is instead lumped into the female or youth class (Croll 1285). Girls deserve their own category and cannot be treated as part of the crowd they need to stand out. Our service learning project is geared with the girls in mind; we want to encourage them to believe in themselves, and to know that they can be leaders in their everyday lives. Our project gears itself toward enabling the girls to identify different types of leadership and their specific leadership style.

Our work with YWLP and the little sisters specifically relates to our Girls and Leadership class through educating big sisters on what truly is Girls leadership and the idea of double dependency that societies place on girls which stick them into the idea of being the people that society must save or else they won’t survive (Croll 1290). We work with YWLP because research has shown that girls as they advance in school fall behind their male counterparts in areas that are mainly “male oriented. (Mc Kee 1)” We want to change that and provide the girls with a voice; a way to show that they are their own category, and deserve respect and understanding in their own right. Old teaching styles used on other groups aren’t useful for girls, and we want to relate the information we are introduced with to create useful ways where the girls are given the most benefit.

Action

            The largest portion of our project will be compiling a ’zine wholly developed and executed by the middle school girls participating in YWLP. The girls will also be decorating a scrapbook to document their progression throughout this semester’s service-learning project, which will be an ongoing part of their YWLP experience. We will also be engaging the girls on the internet by creating spaces for them on Twitter and You tube. A Twitter account will be set up by our service-learning group and we will post thoughts the girls turn in on slips of paper at the end of every meeting. The girls will also be creating a YWLP promotional video and an independent video of their own creative design. On UCF Day we will be conducting a lesson on bullying, with a section on cyber bullying. We will also be working on the scrapbook, voting on the ’zine’s title, and filming the videos.

Timeline

9/23/2011—First Group Meeting (Big sisters met up and created a rough draft plan of what they wanted to do.

9/25/2011—Alumni Meeting (Sister Potluck: We gained some initial ideas on what they girls would want to see in a magazine made for girls and by girls.)

10/5/2011—YWLP Big Sister Meeting

10/12/2011—YWLP Little Sister Meeting (Open submissions, either at meetings to bigs/facilitators or online via email, for the ’zine.)

10/15/2011—UCF Day (We will be collecting entries, submissions, and tweets from the girls to start organizing for the ’zine.)

10/19/2011—YWLP Big Sister Meeting

10/23/2011—YWLP Alumni Event (Nursing Home Volunteering)

10/26/2011—YWLP Little Sister Meeting

11/2/2011—YWLP Big Sister Meeting

11/6/2011—YWLP Alumni Event (Mud Walk)

11/9/2011—YWLP Little Sister Meeting

11/13/2011—YWLP Alumni Event (Soup Kitchen Volunteering)

11/16/2011—YWLP Big Sister Meeting

11/19/2011—YWLP Final Alumni Event (Picnic in the Park)

11/25/2011—Finish compiling the ’zine using girls’ submissions and publish (by combination of printed copies for the girls and PDF for the bigs) to distribute at the last little’s meeting.

11/29/2011—Submit final project report, including creative components (’zine, scrapbook pages, video made with the girls, etc.)

11/30/2011—YWLP Last Little Sister Meeting of the Semester

12/8/2011—In-class presentation of project

Word Count:1154

Works Cited

Croll, Elisabeth.J. “From the Girl Child to Girls’ Rights.” Third World Quarterly 27.7 (2006): n. pag. JSTOR. Web. 9 September 2011.

. The American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. The AAUW Report. How Schools Shortchange Girls.1992. Web. 9 September 2011.

"UCF: CAH: Young Women Leaders Program." UCF: CAH: Women's Studies Program:             Mentoring Programs for Faculty. University of Central Florida, 2010. Web. 28            Sept. 2011. <http://womensstudies.cah.ucf.edu/ywlp/index.php>.