GIRLS' POWER: This empowerment program engages girls and supports them to build self-confidence, create social connections, and develop critical thinking skills. Girls participate in a range of activities including team building, physical activity, preparing and sharing healthy snacks, media literacy skills building, arts activism and special events.
This free program is open to all girls ages 9 -24.
This program offers:
- Girls' Power provides girls with an ongoing space to have fun, be active and creative and connect with other girls.
- Girls have opportunities to make new friends and develop positive relationships.
- Opportunities to explore issues such as building self-esteem, understanding media, creating arts and media, girls rights and feminism, positive body image development, what safety means to them.
- Opportunities to connect with positive role models.
- Support and resources.
- Special events and trips including nature experiences.
We believe:
- IF girls are able to access safe(r) girls - only space can freely be themselves, make friends, gain skills, develop their voices and take the lead to create change.
- THEN they will enter high school with an increased social-safety net work and community connections, with the confidence to speak up and with the critical thinking skills required to navigate the complexity of issues and pressures that put teen girls at risk in their secondary school years. After secondary school they will join University and finish with all that it requires to cause the desired change in the communities they choose to live.
Our goals are:
- To create girls' - inclusive and diversity-positive space
- To provide girls with opportunities to develop critical-thinking-skills through media awareness and education
- To support girls to speak-up through media creation, art and activism
- To provide girls with a range of diverse female role models
- To build girl peer support networks and enhance connections between women and girls in our community
- To support girls’ capacity to make healthy and safe choices
FAMILY SUPPORT PROGRAM: When families face difficult situations, including poverty, family breakups and isolation, Wide Smiles for All is Through Education is dedicated to providing services in a respectful and non-judgmental manner.
Besides our regular core programs, we are offering the following programs to support local families:
- Food - food and gifts at Christmas time
- Clothing – outdoor clothing for children
- Backpack/school bags & Shoes Program – We supply school shoes, Christmas Shoes.
Our activities fall under three categories: practical assistance, advocacy, and education. we are counting upon individuals, agencies and organizations of good will and of course crop harvests from my garden to enable us do the needful. Our goal is to end child poverty.