What We Do
JLMC’s The Girl Power Project® is our flagship program. It is a transformational program targeting girls in underprivileged communities as they enter the most vulnerable juncture of their lives: adolescence. This project steps in just as girls face the choices that will lead them to a life of early marriage, pregnancy, and disease OR a life of education, economic independence, and delayed marriage.
That’s why PankhRise Foundation is investing in one of the most effective ways to create the needed shift at the grassroots level: life skills and mentoring training for adolescent girls ages 12-15 so they are equipped to stay in school and avoid forced child marriage, early pregnancy, and disease.
PankhRise Foundation has worked alongside partners in USA and Uganda to get trained and test the Girl Power Project – a replicable curriculum and system of delivery to empower girls with the knowledge, skills and assets they need to stay in school and avoid child marriage, disease, early pregnancy and violence. Our local team of mentors, advocates and partners collaborate to implement The Girl Power Project in five schools in Meerut. Adolescent girls ages 12-15 receive over 60 hours of engaging empowerment workshops, camps and club sessions. The program also has the module of training adolescent boys in critical life skills and advocacy of girls.
How it Works
The Girl Power Project® aims to reach 50-80% of girls, aged 12-15 years, within a community with curriculum that is delivered through an intensive two-year program. Before PankhRise Foundation trains girls in the Girl Power Project® curriculum, essential community stakeholders gain the knowledge that is needed to support empowered girls.
Deliberate and targeted engagement with men and boys is increasingly recognized as critical to advancing gender equity and equality. It is necessary not only for the empowerment of women and girls, but also to transform the social and gender norms that reinforce patriarchy and inequality and harm women/girls, men/boys and people of other genders.
Girl Power Project® Advocates are trusted adults in the community who learn the same Girl Power Project® curriculum that girls learn, and they’re equipped to support and mentor the girls in their community. With help from local partners and trusted adults in the community, GPP’s program facilitators help girl Peer Mentors share what they have learned with others (including girls who do not attend school) through club sessions. Some club sessions invite the entire community to participate, so that girls are learning alongside their parents, guardians, and siblings.
What the Girls are saying :
The Girl Power Project helped me to open up and share my feelings and problems without much fear and shame now. The good thing is the program helped me become a good mentor for others.
Periods are not dirty, they are natural, in fact they are good for our body. No one explained this to me before like this.
Violence is not just physical but it has many forms. Thank you for teaching me this. It was necessary.