This week I was able to get a little more insight on what programming at Global G.L.O.W. actually looks like. Healthy G.L.O.W. is a pilot program that aims to mentor and educate girls by emphasizing the importance of wellness. Healthy G.L.O.W. focuses on the intersections of physical, social, and mental health and their implications on community development.
Lalah Delia once said, “Self-care is how you take you power back.” Self-efficacy plays a vital role in an individual’s ability to empower themselves and I am a firm believer that holistic self-care lays the foundation for self-efficacy. If we want to ensure that the girls who matriculate through Global G.L.O.W. programs become the leaders of transformative change within their communities, we have to make sure they know how to take care of themselves first.
The program mentors for Healthy G.L.O.W. spent most of the week prepping for a recruitment presentation this upcoming Tuesday. I was given the opportunity to sit in on a mock presentation and directly observe how they engage with the girls we serve. The objective of the presentation was to boost morale and encourage girls who attend a nearby school to enroll in the Healthy G.L.O.W. program. The presentation did a great job summarizing what the program would entail and the importance of what the girls would be learning. However, it was missing something, a take away. After brainstorming we figured a literal takeaway, a memento of sorts, would be the icing on the cake. Twenty minutes and an assortment of bright colored markers later, we created an origami fortune teller with a twist. We opted to use the inside flaps of our fortune tellers to provide the girls with words of encouragement. That way they’d be able to walk away from the presentation with something that was both a tangible reminder of Healthy G.L.O.W. and a boost of confidence.
I always enjoy the work I do at Global G.L.O.W. but being able to contribute to something that would have a direct impact on the confidence of the girls we aim to serve filled me with a different type of joy than usual. This joy really resonated with me because it spoke to the younger version of myself who wasn’t always as confident as she should have been. The version of myself who believed in the “like a girl fallacy” and could have used an extra boost of encouragement. Working with the Healthy G.L.O.W. mentors made me feel like I was doing something to ignite the power of girls to spark change even if it was something as small as making a paper craft.