Help raise girls' aspirations around the world!

At Inspiring Girls we want to ensure that the work we do is making a difference and with young girls at the heart of everything we do as a charity we want to make sure we are listening to their needs and their voices! 

Our first ever Young Ambassadors Network was established almost a year ago -  a group of eleven girls aged eleven to sixteen from around the world - and with the support of our GlobalGiving donors in that time we have worked closely with our young Ambassadors to help combat one of the major hurdles they face - a lack of inspiring role models!

Girls demand the right to work towards the professional futures they choose, research shows that gender stereotypes start to affect their perceptions and life choices from as young as seven years old. The work that we do at Inspiring Girls International helps to combat these stereotypes and helps to clarify some of the skills and qualities that will be helpful for the jobs of the future.

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Over the last year we have worked on a number of different activities with our Young Ambassadors, some of which have been to help them speak to the women who inspire them and others have helped to inform the work that we are doing so that the voices of young girls are truly at the core of our work. We have highlighted some of the many wonderful activities the girls have done since their inauguration on International Day of the Girl in 2020. 

Blog Posts:

Over the last year we have encouraged all the girls in our Young Ambassadors Network to write for the Inspiring Girls blog on the topics that are most important to them. Malena, our Young Ambassador from Spain, wrote about some of the books that have inspired her and that she would recommend to other girls her age. In her piece, Quincy from Hong Kong talks about five of the most inspiring women in Hong Kong and Catalina from Colombia wrote about the women in literature who were not only ahead of their time but should have been celebrated much sooner than they were! Most recently, our young Serbian Young Ambassador, Marija, wrote about Mileva Maric the Serbian mathematician and physicist, who was a coworker and the wife of Albert Einstein and whose work is said to have contributed to her husband’s scientific discoveries yet was never celebrated for it.

Video Interviews with their Role Models:

We helped each of the girls with the opportunity to conduct a short 15 minute online video interview with role models from each of their countries to talk about their career journeys, advice and any other topics that might be of interest. The girls so far have interviewed singers, physicists, climate scientists, founders of businesses, neuroscientists and clinical psychologists. With every progressive interview we learn more and more about the questions that are most important to the girls we work with and see the impact that the role models are having on the girls!

Inspiring Girls Video Hub Review:

The Inspiring Girls Video Hub has been one of our largest projects since it launched in 2019 and now we’re so proud to say that we have hundreds of women featured on it across six languages. The purpose of the Hub is to help girls see a true representation of the options they have and just how limitless they are. We are on a mission to continue to improve the content we have on the Hub so that it is even more useful for girls. To do this we worked with our Young Ambassadors to hear what they liked most about the videos they watched, what they thought could be improved and if they could pick anyone to have on the Hub who it would be and why! 

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These are three of the many activities our Young Ambassadors have worked on and without the support we have received from donors on GlobalGiving have helped to make this possible. We are working hard to continue to give the girls we work with the opportunity to speak and collaborate with women role models around the world. Any donation you are able to make to our ongoing crowdfunding campaign will help us on our journey, along with supporting all our work happening in 26 countries around the world. 

Links:

• Our Website

Young girls are at the heart of everything we do as a charity. Like everyone, our work has changed significantly during the Covid 19 crisis with so many girls out of school facing huge uncertainty about their future. It is more important than ever that we inspire them to pursue their ambitions!

Girls demand the right to work towards the professional futures they choose, free from the gender stereotypes which start to affect their perceptions and life choices from 7 years old. The work that we do at Inspiring Girls International helps to combat these stereotypes and helps to clarify some of the skills and qualities that will be helpful for the jobs of the future.

An important part of our global team is our Young Ambassadors Network - a group of eleven girls aged eleven to sixteen from around the world. One of the main projects which they have been working on during the recent lockdowns and school closures is a series of interviews with some of the women that inspire them. It is more important than ever to hear the voices of the girls at every level of our organisation so we have encouraged the girls to ask the women who are involved in the interviews the questions they really want answered. The support from our GlobalGiving donors has made this possible for us to support them through the process, such as providing them with interview resources, guidance when reaching out to their role models, recording support and video editing. 

Case studies 

Quincy, our Young Ambassador from Hong Kong, interviewed Ines Gafsi. Ines was voted one of the “Top 10 Female Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong” by Hong Kong Tatler and in her interview Quincy spoke to Ines about her journey from working in retail to establishing her business, her passion for helping other women achieve success and her advice for overcoming obstacles as an entrepreneur. During her time as a Young Ambassador, Quincy’s confidence has grown significantly and said recently that “all girls should be empowered to be whoever they want to be. It is so easy to be bogged down by the noise around us “. 

Our Young Ambassador from Colombia, Catalina, interviewed her role model Sandra Rubio DaCosta. Sandra is a leading #FinTech entrepreneur, the CEO at IMIX Consulting and a passionate advocate for female empowerment. During her interview she shares with Catalina her experience of leadership, her goal to use tech to reduce poverty and her insights of being a female entrepreneur in Latina America. Catalina spoke of how the opportunity to speak directly with Sandra not only gave her the opportunity to ask questions that really mattered to her but also meant that she could actively share those experiences with her friends, school mates and family.

These are just two of the videos of our Young Ambassadors interview series and you can watch the rest of them on our Video Hub. 

We are working hard to continue to give the girls we work with the opportunity to speak and collaborate with women role models around the world. Any donation you are able to make to our ongoing crowdfunding campaign will help us on our journey, along with supporting all our work happening in 23 countries around the world. 

Links:

• Watch the Young Ambassador interviews here
• The Inspiring Girls International Website
• Stay up to date on our work on Instagram!