Kim

Every day, Kim saw her community being destroyed by violence, poverty, and substance abuse.

That’s a heavy burden for a ten-year-old girl, and it was slowly eroding her hope for the future.

But then Kim had the chance to join a girls club and work with female mentors on a community improvement project.

When the program started, the facilitators asked the girls to describe what they thought a leader looked like. The girls all agreed that a leader was “a man in a suit.”

By the end of the program, the girls were defining leaders in a whole new way – they now included “their grannies, their moms, their teachers and, most importantly, themselves.”

As the girls explored different ways to create positive change in their community, Kim’s hope was slowly restored. She began to see it was actually possible to make positive changes in her community.

She also developed a new confidence—she realized that she too could become a leader and help her community begin to heal.