Vision:
GLC envisions a world where gender parity is achieved at all levels, and across all sectors, in order for all humans to live a fulfilled and purposeful life
Mission:
To equip tomorrow’s leaders with the skills, mindsets, network, and experiences necessary to work on challenges that matter.
The GLC Story – Our Why
Girls Leadership Collaborative (GLC) was developed to provide girls the experiences necessary to uncover their strengths, explore their interests, examine how and why they interact with others in group settings, and create purpose while working to positively impact their communities, a cause, or the world. GLC provides the necessary practice engaging in safe and developmentally appropriate risk taking as participants develop as leaders; girls who can and do take initiative. We can only learn to lead WHILE leading in real-time with reflective practices alongside supportive facilitators. This requires an informed, yet fearless, experiential approach where failure is seen as an inherent part of the most powerful learning and is exactly what increases capacity to lead. Collaboratively discussing the intent, observable phenomena, and resulting impact of our actions, choices, and mindsets allows us to not position failure as wrong; rather collectively uncover the why behind the outcome, and thus create new opportunities for achieving and aligning intent and impact. This is most effective when facilitators share their internal dialogue and elicit the contributions of the entire team. Why did this work? Why didn’t this work? How might we have better generated the impact we had intended?
While engaging in collaborative challenges and our intentional reflective practices, girls explore such phenomena as group formation theory in action, design-thinking methodologies, self-expression, communication, outcome-oriented conflict resolution and so much more. Our unique programming and content ranges from neurobiology & brain research, to application of Gallup’s Strengths-finder tool and Mindfulness training, all made accessible through our developmentally supportive facilitation techniques using our unique GLC curriculum. Developing service learning projects or community initiatives as an outcome provides a meaningful context in which to examine and apply our human experiences in group while working toward a greater purpose.
Central to GLC is the question: How can what it is I know, and am able to do, benefit a community, a cause, or the world? Effective collaboration and leadership is dependent upon understanding one’s own behaviors and motivations in group settings. Being able to apply your strengths, as well as leverage and celebrate the strengths of others is a critical competency of leaders. It is particularly important to facilitate this work using real-world context and explicit instruction with young people. By designing opportunities to apply talents, passions and skills to global or community problems, requiring leadership and collaboration, young people can begin to feel agency in their learning and in their lives.
We spend a great deal of time as young people learning how to write effectively, think creatively, solve hypothetical mathematical problems, analyze text, and successfully recall scientific phenomenon, and the like. This is all in an effort to enter “real-life” with a fully polished toolbox of sorts, from which to draw the appropriate information or skill to apply toward a future challenge. What if multiple challenges already exist? What if young people were to be given the opportunity to solve, or make contributions to today’s problems? We see examples of young people making significant contributions to a myriad industries, social enterprises, activist causes, and creative endeavors with increasing frequency. What is critical for young people to contribute effectively to their communities is an ability to understand group dynamics, to enhance collaboration, and to understand the altruistic nature of leadership, and to have the ability to work toward a bigger idea; an unselfish concern for the greater, global community.
The result was the creation of GLC, where research-based social and cognitive development, group formation theory, social hierarchies, and project-based, service learning can help to maximize one’s productivity and success in real-world settings.
