Welcome to Belonging in Action, a series about how Girls Leadership creates sustainable support for students and teachers. Today’s post asks, How did you learn SEL? Our facilitators ask this question of all the participating adults before most of our trainings, and in most cases, the answers are the same: they didn’t. Social and emotional …
This year marked our 15th anniversary as an organization, including a major change. While we started as a direct-service girl-serving organization, we’ve arrived at a new approach. When you listen to girls for 15 years you learn a ton, and what we learned is that the girls are powerful; it is the adults in their …
You may have heard of the Alphabet Relay, a fun group relay to brainstorm as many ideas as possible using the structure of the alphabet. The Girls Leadership version, an Emotional Alphabet Relay, is a game to help players express how they are feeling and reflect on their relationship with their emotions. This version was …
One thing we know for sure is that educators want to know how to make social-emotional learning inclusive. One of our most popular posts of all time is about the many reasons social and emotional learning (SEL) — the process of developing personal and relational awareness, communication, and decision-making skills — is a priority as we …
Based on our many years of running programs, and countless conversations with girls, parents, caregivers, and educators, we know that our work is impactful. Yet we’re always so deeply moved to hear how our programs and tools help people make positive change in their lives. We had an opportunity to chat with Alejandra Cardenas, a …
Try this “Relax, Risk, and Reckless” comfort zones lesson. It is included in the Girls Leadership curriculum from our Belonging in Sports workshop for sports educators and coaches on May 21. Join us April 14-16 in Oakland, CA for our Collective Belonging training. Every day at Girls Leadership we ask students, parents and caregivers, …
Like all educators, Girls Leadership Program Manager Catherine Castillo Cruz gets up early. There’s always a lot to do, and she has a long commute before she can even start. It’s January in New York and the cold is biting. Catherine checks her phone, hoping for a distraction from the seeping chill, but instead there’s …
The wellness needs of students, especially girls and gender-expansive youth (anxiety and depression in teen girls is twice the rate of boys), have evolved and intensified during the past few years, so it’s more crucial than ever for all of us adults working and supporting girls and gender-expansive youth to nurture warm and authentic relationships …
After two years of virtual everything, it was both shocking and wonderful to watch my colleagues Hénia Belalia and Cassandra Brown make magic at SXSW EDU this month for Girls Leadership’s session, Co-creating Justice-Centered SEL with Students. During this session, Hénia and Cassandra shared our curriculum development process, which is based in Liberatory Design and …
The impact of the pandemic on the mental health of young people is well known, whether we are seeing the effects unfold in our own homes, or hearing from the American Academy of Pediatrics or the U.S. Surgeon General about the tenuous state of child and adolescent mental health. And we also know that the …
