By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
The KD Hall Foundation is set to launch this year’s Girls on the Rise program (GOTR), which will feature a cohort of 20-30 high school freshmen girls who will be given the opportunity to learn and to discover effective communication skills, self-worth and resilience through a curriculum tailored to the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and how youth can apply these skills in the future.
The Girls on the Rise pilot program was initiated in the spring of 2018 in the Highline School District. The Girls on the Rise conferences centered on young girls from inner-city and urban areas, primarily Black/African American girls and girls of color who were subjected to issues like human sex trafficking and the school-to-prison pipeline.
This year’s program is designed to address the academic and social acumen, needs and issues of all young women regardless of race and zip code, bringing the attributes of all cultures in a collective manner for the young girls to learn from each other and preparing them for their futures and what it takes to succeed. Recruitment for the program will take place from March 9 – 23 with interviews taking place on March 26.
“I am super excited this is our fourth year working on our Girls On The Rise program,” says Kela Hall, Executive Director of the KD Hall Foundation. “Girls on the Rise is pretty much a leadership program for girls. We target girls in high school particularly ninth graders focusing on leadership skills like business acumen, self-efficacy, resiliency classes and conflict management.”
Because of the importance of community and financial support, funding from such supporters like the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), GOTR has positioned itself to providing stable support and mentorship to young women across the state.
“This year we were able to fund the program by OSPI,” Hall states. “They funded our statewide program so we are going to be offering it to ninth grader at Evergreen High School. We picked Evergreen and the Highline School District because that district has a high level of students who may be considered at risk.”
According to Hall, the program will provide leadership lessons students can take with them for the remainder of their high school careers. In addition, participants in the program will receive a stipend and Girls On The Rise learning materials. The candidates will be followed by the program throughout their high school starting with at the freshmen level.
“This program is designed for all girls,” says Hall. “I believe in power of the collective and what I mean by that is it will serve, Black girls, Asian girls, indigenous girls and White girls better if we had them working together even if their zip codes were different.”
“We know that it is very valuable for young girls no matter what their socioeconomic status is to be able to work together,” continued Hall. “Because girls in Bellevue have a lot to give and a lot to gain by working with girls from Evergreen and vice versa. So, this is why we are opening up the program statewide so that these girls can work with other girls in other school districts.”
Due to the increase in funding, the program will be able to offer for the first time a full 10-week program. This program, which will provide a learning environment that centers on a focus-group approach, will be 100-percent online. The program will feature courses that will focus business acumen, self-efficacy, conflict management and other confidence building themes each week.
“This will be a virtual program,” says Hall. “We were not virtual in the past but because of the 2020 pandemic we will be virtual and that is the reason why the funding was so important. It is important for us to engage with students during this COVID time and so we decided to use our funding to launch a program that we’ve have been trying to launch for three years but we never had the funding.”
Hall hopes that this cohort will be instrumental in helping hone a lesson plan that will be utilized statewide during the 2021-22 school year.
“What we are doing today is we are preparing these girls from the class to prepare them for the boardroom, which I think is really important,” says Hall. “And, I think it is really important that all girls have a place where they can work together.”
To get more information or to apply for a spot in the program, young ladies in high school will need to send an email to kela@kdhall.com and add GOTR to the subject line.
