WomenChangeAfrica: Cultivating Women: Empowering Young African Girls at Telem Camp!

To launch our cultivating women series, this past weekend we spent the day with the young ladies at Telem Center for the African Child's annual summer camp. Before we talk about our work this weekend a fabulous things about this organization you should know. Firstly the organization is headed up by an African woman by the name Diana Musa a young Sierra Leone woman passionate about giving back to her community. The organization also provides services to African immigrant families in the NYC tri state region and one of their many services includes a weekend long summer camp for African immigrant youth with cultural enrichment activities, learning and exploration experiences. The African immigrant community in the United States needs services in order for families to thrive and be successful. We partnered with the organization as a client to conduct the girls empowerment workshop to cultivate young women at their camp this weekend!

We were excited to empower young girls through a series of hands on creative activities . The goals of the worksho were for the girls to identify positive qualities about themselves and one another and envision their future through vision mapping or in our case vision journaling :) . The young women were between ages 8 to 15 originally from Sierra Leone, Senegal, Benin, Guinea and other African countries; based in the United States with their families were thrilled to participate in the workshop and had some very rich and positive conversations during our time well spent together. Overall feedback and evaluations from the workshop yielded a strong agreement that all of our participants loved the workshop and would participate in something similar in the future. The young women also noted that they felt a sense of community because they bonded with other young women who they were first meeting, they also expressed that the workshop made them feel positive about themselves, creative and they felt that they could achieve anything if they envisioned it! All participants also stated that this was their fist time doing something like this! For us that is success! We were truly humbled and pleased to learn from these young women and are excited to share more of our journey as we continue to cultivate communities of young women. Check out our photos and to learn more or donate to such an awesome organization visit their website at http://www.telemcenter.org/.

Photos to come soon!