Principles and Framework

Our unique approach is based upon five overarching principles:

1. Popular Education/Critical Education

Popular education is a model that begins with a personal experience and moves towards collective action. Contrary to traditional hierarchal education where experts hold the knowledge, this model is grounded in the belief that everyone is an expert, and argues that learning is not a top-down process.

For Girls Action, keeping the focus on girls’ experiences in our programs allows girls to recognize that they are important as individuals and that together, they can have an impact on their reality. We favour grassroots and critical education approaches that are designed to recognize girls’ knowledge, and we invite them to be experts in their own lives. This popular education model validates girls’ experiential knowledge and actively engages and empowers individuals to move towards collective change.

2. Integrated Feminist Analysis
At Girls Action we recognize that the girls in our programs are diverse in terms of their race, socio-economic status, ability, sexuality, gender identity, religion, culture, Aboriginal, refugee, immigrant or other status, and much more. We also recognize that in order to build support networks and community among girls, we must recognize and take into account the multiple and intersecting nature of these diverse identities.

We do this by incorporating and working from an integrated feminist analysis framework. Through this framework, we focus on understanding structures of power and systemic issues and how these factors interact with girls’ lives. This framework recognizes that policies and practices have varying impacts on different groups of girls’ according to the power or lack of power they experience in their lives. By recognizing and addressing how power affects girls in their different social locations and wide-ranging histories, Girls Action strives to empower girls in all their diversity and to build communities to encourage girls to mobilize together for transformational change.

3. Transformational Change
We believe that both individual and collective action is needed in order to create a socially just world free of discrimination and oppression. Social justice requires change on multiple levels: the individual, the community, and the systemic. This means that we support girls to take action in their own lives, in their own communities, and in their own initiatives – to influence policy, the educational system, laws, and so on.

4. Critically Asset-Based
Working from a positive-oriented lens that emphasizes the capacities and assets of girls’ personal realities and experiences, the Girls Action approach builds on girls’ strengths and community resources. Rather than positioning girls as passive recipients, we see girls as agents of social change. We work with and for girls, encouraging them to develop knowledge as a political process, which in turn inspires them to take collective action in their communities. This is an asset-based approach that embraces social, political and economic reflection and critical perspective while acknowledging that girls face certain structural barriers (including institutionalized racism, poverty, homophobia, ablism, and other forms of structural and personal violence).

5. Organic
The Girls Action approach is continuously shaped and reshaped by young women’s input and feedback. An ongoing process of learning, reflecting, researching, acting, and evaluating informs our work on both the organizational and programming levels. We are committed to remaining adaptable and relevant to the changing realities of girls' and young women's lives.