All of us here at Grassroots are very excited about the rollout of our pilot all-girls’ curriculum, Grassroots Girls! We thought we’d share a little bit more about how this curriculum came about as we begin to deliver it in two programs at Washington School for Girls.
This year, TGP received a donation from the Nike Community Impact Fund and from the Washington Area Women’sFoundation Rainmakers Giving Circle program, which funds programs that work to empower at-risk girls to lead healthy lives. With these grants, we undertook the project of creating an all-girls sexual health curriculum. Jacquelyn Katuin (one of TGP’s awesome summer interns) spearheaded the project. Drawing from CDC’s best practices and the DC Health Education benchmarks, we modified and added to the core Grassroots sexual health curriculum to better meet the needs of young girls in DC. We also worked with Liz Puloka from Cultures of Consent (http://culturesofconsent.org/) to create the consent-related areas of the program.
The curriculum features some of the classic TGP games like Find the Ball, but also introduces some new games and many new key messages that address areas especially pertinent to adolescent girls: consent, condom negotiation, relationship violence, STIs, and unintended pregnancy.
We just completed training for the awesome female veteran coaches who will be piloting this curriculum at the Washington School for Girls this semester, and can’t wait to hear the feedback once the program starts. Click HERE to hear from some of our Grassroots Girls coaches on why this curriculum is so important and exciting!
Finally, to everyone involved thus far: you have set us up for success to empower these young girls to lead healthy lives…thank you!!
