For the first time in over a decade, Girls Speak Out Worldwide is launching a special project for girls called The Caged Bird Sings.
Girls Speak Out was co-founded to bring girls ages eight to eighteen years old who come from a variety of backgrounds together for a series of workshops. During the workshops, they cross traditional boundaries of age, race, class, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and politics and explore common ground. In each workshop, to the co-founders' delight, instead of needing to be rescued, girls have been inspiring each other—and women who come to assist them. Girls become role models for each other. They consistently display courage and resiliency that challenges obstacles they all face in varying degrees in each country on the planet.
Girls in extreme circumstances, however, require unique and sustained support. While they can also learn from each other, and even develop their own healing programs, they also need specialized information from experts that focuses on their survival as well as their strengths. The extreme circumstances The Caged Bird Sings Project will address include:
As one girl says, “All girls have a right to understand their importance to society. We’ve been mistreated and misinformed over the ages about what we deserve and what we can and can’t do.”
The Caged Bird Sings Project was created and piloted by Andrea Johnston in juvenile detention centers in northern California in 2004. It will be launched in Africa in 2006 with a focus on HIV/AIDS, and will use the Girls Speak Out Train-the-Trainers program to ensure that an increasing number of girls in several countries will benefit over the next years.
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*Used with permission of Dr. Maya Angelou