Do you run programs for girls in your community?
Welcome!
This is a skills-building, outcomes-improving hub for women who uplift girls in their communities. Led by and for women serving girls in the Global South.
Through our Girls First Institute, She’s the First offers grassroots leaders:
- toolkits to support girl-centered programming
- local and virtual trainings
- pipelines to funding opportunities
- an annual conference on girl-centered program design
- among other tailored opportunities
How to join:
Grassroots leaders can access courses and resources at no cost. You will receive certifications for various levels of participation and training.
Why join?
Changing girls’ environments starts with investing in you—the women who run programs for at-risk girls. We will teach you ways to increase girls’ power and voice within your organization, so you can create more effective programming for them.
Together, we can build a world where every girl chooses her own future.
What Would You Do?
A Game to Inspire Healthy Relationships
This card game allows girls in three different age groups to safely explore—through play and conversation with peers and a mentor—the building blocks of healthy relationships and strategies for creating safe personal boundaries.
Feminist Mentorship Manual
This manual serves as a resource for mentors who are developing programs and want to support their mentees from a feminist standpoint. It provides four key principles and helps you design your own mentorship style with your mentees that works in your setting.
Listening to Girls Toolkit
This toolkit walks you through how to hold focus groups with girls, to design and evaluate programs that work for your specific community. No research experience? No monitoring and evaluation department? No problem! This kit, which includes a case study and training video, was made for all community-based organizations.
Girl-Centered Risk Register
This simple tool re-envisions a risk register to assist organizations in analyzing and mitigating the risks girls in their communities face. We recommend working with a group of girls at least once per year to update the register and develop mitigation strategies. It is useful when an emergency situation emerges (such as a pandemic) and you need to assess girls’ changing needs.
The following resources can be used by a mentor with a group of girls or by girls independently.
For more resources and opportunities for girls, please see our For Girls page.
The Global Girls’ Bill of Rights Toolkit
More than 1,000 girls in 36 countries contributed to this declaration of their top ten rights. The final bill was presented to the United Nations in 2019. The toolkit includes discussion guides for mentors or peer-led girls’ groups. It’s available in English, French, Spanish, and Swahili.
Discover Your Power Journal
This is a self-empowerment workbook for secondary-school aged girls to develop their voice. Through this experience, girls learn to build their community, identify their personal goals, cultivate safe spaces, and create strategies on how to advocate for themselves and others.
My Period Diary
My Period Diary is a one-year manual period tracker that can be used when educating girls on menstrual health. With this tool, girls can easily track their period for a year and learn to create their own calendars for the future.
CUSTOM TRAININGS:
She’s the First creates custom training for coalitions and foundations interested in providing organizations with girl-centered design tools and skills. All of our trainings use participatory methods to design the agenda, and many include Girl Hour, a module we developed to ethically integrate girls’ voices into the training process. To learn more, please email us.
OPEN OPPORTUNITIES:
Got your resources? Apply to join our Girls First Network and you can talk with other organizations using them. No matter where you are based, learn from peers and receive ongoing news from STF about leadership opportunities for girls and external grants.
If you are based in East or West Africa, the annual Girls First Summit, hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, is a valuable experience for you. Registered organizations will be invited to send two representatives.