New Girl City: Agents of Change

Now in our third year, New Girl City: Agents of Change engages over 75 female-identifying, high school-age young people, from all five boroughs, in civic education and development of key skills to organize and make change in their communities and beyond.

About New Girl City

New Girl City: Agents of Change (NGC) is Girls Club’s six-month, citywide leadership initiative. Championed by the Women’s Caucus of the NYC Council, NGC educates and activates future female leaders for NYC and beyond NGC brings together female-identified young people (ages 14 to 21) across the city to learn the symbiotic relationship between civics/public office and social justice. They train and build critical skills in community organizing, issue analysis, solution development and utilize the arts, speech, and action to make change in their communities and beyond.

The program was piloted with two partners in three boroughs (Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan) in 2019 and served 60 participants. Now in its second year, we are thrilled to have expanded the initiative to six partners in all five boroughs.

Vision

New Girl City is designed to address the dire gender parity issues related to womxn in civic leadership and public service. Only 12 womxn are represented in the 51-member NYC Council (23%) and the state and national parity averages are no better: according to Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics, womxn hold 23.7% of seats in Congress, 25% in Senate and 23.4% in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Girls Club has a long and successful history of addressing environmental, entrepreneurial and ethical issues through our innovative and community-focused initiatives. We empower girls and womxn to actively change their community’s circumstances. NGC program activities incorporate an intersectional range of issues affecting our community, environment, and the lives of womxn, people of color and marginalized New Yorkers.

Goals & Objectives

Our primary objective is to develop young womxn’s leadership by cultivating and honing skills in:

Community Organizing and Advocacy
Civic and Policy Engagement
Collaborative Social Justice Activism
Debate/Public Speaking
Art (film, photography, design, music) as a Form of Joy, Education, and Activism,
Research Design and Data Analysis

Is it our ultimate hope that our young womxn are positively engaged in civics: whether it’s voting in every election, registering their friends and families, advocating for the issues they care about, working for a campaign or an elected official, or running for office themselves.

Our Project Goals

To DEVELOP THE KNOWLEDGE and skills of young womxn in the areas of community engagement, organizing and skill-based action.

To CULTIVATE THE DESIRE of New York City young womxn to actively participate in solving their community’s issues through civic engagement.

To UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE of womxn leadership at all levels by giving them an understanding of the unique role, vantage point, and value that womxn possess.

To CONTEXTUALIZE the current local, state, and federal politics of the day and ground the girls in the urgency of their experience with A Vote for Her is a Vote for Us summit.

To ACTIVATE participants’ parents and families to continue or begin encouraging the community engagement and civic action of their children and their community.

To COMPENSATE young people for the valuable, yet often thankless, work of social change.

Get Involved

If you’d like to get involved in New Girl City, please reach out to: ebonie@girlsclub.org

Click Here to Read and Download our Pilot Report

Pilot Report

2020 Civic Action Projects

About

Throughout March and April of this year, we adapted our curriculum to contextualize the current COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice uprisings. Participants met virtually in groups to develop a proposal for a social justice project that addresses an issue critical to their immediate communities.

Working with five different local partner organizations, the groups came up with their own recommendations for the issues based on their research and experiences from NGC workshops. From June 3–4, 2020 our participants virtually presented their Local Civic Action Projects over Zoom to school principals, government officials, and local community organizations.

Video Description: New Girl City Participant, and Girls Club member, Paradise moderates our Women Run and Women Win panel, which featured women activists-turned-candidates Amanda Farias, Althea Stevens and Chantel Jackson. Notably, Paradise, aged 17, decided to join her Community Board in 2020 after her experience with New Girl City in 2019

Sauti Yetu

COVID-19 Response

The cohort from Sauti Yetu suggests donating to food banks, encouraging others to donate blood, and creating and donating materials for healthcare workers.
We must do our part by staying in our houses, washing our hands, social distancing, and staying informed about the virus. We can also use art to relieve stress.
We must use our voices to speak to public officials and advocate for required safety measures.

Bard HS Early College Queens

Food Insecurity

This group from Bard HS Early College Queens plans to reach out to companies that rescue “irregular” produce and create food pick-up centers around NYC in vulnerable communities. The group will work with companies such as Misfits Market, Imperfect Foods, and Hungry Harvest to purchase “irregular” fruits and vegetables at discounted prices.
The group also wants to create a fund for those in need who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
The group plans to fundraise, research, and understand local regulations for food pantries by:
- Contacting local government officials
- Learning more about the population they plan to serve
- Finding food storage
- Creating a budget
- Finding volunteers to help with the food pantry
They encourage youth to use social media effectively and create understandable infographics to spread awareness about soup kitchens and food drives.
Schools should teach students the importance and value of food. Many students get lunch and eat one item while throwing the rest out. The group aims to control food waste upon returning to school.
Food that can be composted should be disposed of properly. Many students do not sort their food out in the cafeteria because it isn’t encouraged or their cafeteria may not have other options such as green or blue recycling bins.

School Integration

High schoolers, like these students from Bard Early College, can contact local middle school administrators to work with younger students on goal setting and inform them about their own experiences in specialized schools.
We can increase diversity in schools through reaching out to low income middle schools and ensuring that students are informed about the complex high school application process.
All schools should be required to join the Diversity in Admissions program, which gives priority to low income students.

Cancel Rent

This group from Bard Early College signed and supported an online petition on canceling rent. They also sent out an email and a Google Form to their school community and hosted a phone banking event on a Zoom meeting.
Community members need to contact local officials and inform them about the importance of cancelling rent during the COVID-19 crisis.
The participants encourage people to inform others about the Cancel Rent movement and why it is important for our communities.

First Star CSI

Staten Island Food Deserts

The group from First Star CSI suggests writing a nonprofit proposal to source fresh produce, distribute it to smaller stores, price produce affordably, provide produce in smaller amounts, and replace expired items.
To help increase access to healthy foods, we can create a transportation petition to ensure affordable alternatives to delayed or out of service transportation, create bus stops near grocery areas, and increase frequency of bus arrivals. We can also move farmer’s markets closer to bus stops for healthy food pop-ups.
Supermarkets should innovate more membership programs for bargains, incentives, and benefits on grocery items, especially produce.

Girls Club

Mental Health for Youth

One cohort from the Lower Eastside Girls Club encourages the use of journaling, music, or apps like TikTok as avenues for improving mental health and expression during quarantine.
Schools should encourage entrepreneurship, offer early career guidance, and help youth with networking. It is important for local governments to fund these school programs, especially in low income areas, especially because the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) has been cancelled this year

Police Brutality

This group from the Lower Eastside Girls Club sought to analyze and identify: what is wrong with the current police department?
Some solutions might be to radically diversify the police force in America, increase their training to learn about difficulties in the communities they work in, and have more contact with those communities.
Cops should live in or near their working areas so they’re familiar with what’s going on in the community and the people that they serve.
A change needs to be made within the system of government; government officials need to listen, changes need to be made to the police system, there should be less protection for the police who have done wrong in the past.

Red Hook Initiative

RHI Youth Response to SYEP Loss

The cohort from Red Hook Initiative recommended that SYEP funding be reinstated in order to create a virtual summer youth program.
The group supported their peers in posting on social media, submitting letters to the city council, and signing petitions.
They plan to share their video recommendations with the Red Hook Initiative stakeholders via email and social media.