Teen Girls Take on Community Problems : Lessons Learned from the Field / Linda Spatig, Courtney Grimes and Jennifer Farrar.

The Girls' Resiliency Program is a youth empowerment program for girls in a rural, economically depressed area of West Virginia. Girls develop leadership skills by participating in board meetings, discussion groups, recreational events, song writing and poetry workshops, action research, and school and community service projects. Evaluation research conducted during summer and fall 2000 focused on girls' experiences with the action research summer projects and personal relations girls experienced in the program. Two staff members were participant observers in the application process, training sessions, working meetings of the girls' action research teams, and a meeting of the applied communications class, and they interviewed the nine girls who participated in the summer research project. Findings indicate that the girls learned the importance of persistence, hard work, and responsibility and the joy of work that is personally rewarding. They also learned a lot about the problems they studied and how that knowledge could be helpful to them individually and to the broader community. The adults learned that a major factor in program success was the close, respectful personal relationships among the participating girls and women. Forming such relationships between women and girls was not always easy. It required a delicate balance between coaching that pushes too hard, and coaching that coddles too much, demanding too little of individuals who learn to perform to lower expectations. (TD)

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