Engaging Girls, Changing Communities

Engaging Girls, Changing Communities: Examining Girls’ Processes of Civic Engagement and Leadership (EGCC) investigated how young women and girls engaged in leadership and civic activities in new urban environments.

The project brought together researchers, community members, and young women to define leadership on their own terms.

EGCC invited girls to re-define and explore different ways to participate in their communities. The project was designed to create insight into the complexities of nurturing youth girl leadership and ensured that the knowledge reached local school boards and influenced policy change at the Ministry level.

The project recruited, hired, and trained youth girls to act as peer interviewers and to provide insight about themselves as girls, mobilize this knowledge, and communicate broadly about the project activities and findings. In this way, EGCC utilized and built upon youth capacity to take a critical role in examining issues of community engagement and leadership.

EGCC aimed to inform civic stakeholders on how to fully and sustainably engage girls’ relatively untapped potential to enhance civic life. By identifying barriers and enhancers to civic participation and leadership, EGCC contributed to building sustainable community partnerships and activities that took into account the dynamics of the new urban environment and promoted the development of girls as future leaders.

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