Our Dream: Girls Clubs

My counterpart Noxolo and I just arrived back from a week of Peace Corps Life Skills Training in Pretoria and are more ready than ever to get started on our girls clubs! She and I have been talking about them since August and have been waiting for the end of the October school break to start our clubs at each of the local secondary schools. We are each SO EXCITED for these girls clubs! It was great getting to know Noxolo even better in Pretoria because we are actually really similar in our beliefs and values. I think we will make a great team to facilitate these girls clubs.

Our Vision is: Our vision is to see young women empowered to be confident and strong, able to make healthy life choices and ultimately become positive role models for their community.

Our Mission is: To educate, empower, and engage the young women of Alexandria to make healthy and positive life choices in all aspects of their lives.

Our Goals:
• Promote positive self image and confidence
• Teach the importance of making healthy choices
• Promote the Seven Dimensions of Wellness
• To provide important information in a creative, fun, and engaging way
• Educate about HIV/AIDS
• To encourage young women to take control of their future
• Hold a Camp GLOW with group participants.

Each club will meet every other week (one week Ukhanyo, next week Alexandria High) and will be open to girls from grades 8-11. Every other week will have an activity that corresponds with our topics on the weekends. So for example one we will be talking about the environment and the activity will be a community clean up. We already have over a years worth of topics to discuss and do activities on!

The good thing about my girls club is that most of the things require no money to do or facilitate. Some of the activities that we hope to do however do require some money or supplies. We have the basics of what we need (we can borrow from Ikhwezi), but there are still a lot of things that we would like to be able to do with the girls. We have no budget for the girls clubs (although I hope to apply for a VAST Grant for it) I’ve put together a “wish list” of some things that we would love to have in order to do some of our planned activities until we can secure some kind of funding. We also have planned activities of fundraising in our community and we want to get the community involved (hello – sustainability!) so donations will be asked for within the community as well.

If there is anything that you see on this list that you would be interested in sending to Noxolo and me for our girls clubs, please let me know via email so that I can alert others that someone is getting it – you can e-mail me at alanamcginty@gmail.com.

GIRLS CLUBS WISH LIST:
• Post Secret Book (for an activity that we are going to do about self esteem and overcoming personal challenges)
• Stationary (plain white cards)
• Any educational materials (if you know of any local non profits/government agencies that deal with health or youth if you could stop by them and pick up educational pamphlets and send them our way – any topic would be great but especially on things like sexual health, “changing bodies”, nutrition, etc!)
• Markers, crayons, sharpies, colored chalk
• Old magazines (magazines about any topic would be great – they are for our Vision Boards when we talk about our future and our goals…Oprah anyone?)
• Colored string for friendship bracelets
• Duct tape/clear packing tape/scotch tape
• Color paper
• Spool of yarn
• ANY random arts and crafts things that you think we might be able to use/you want to get rid of (beads, string, buttons, scrapbook papers, stickers, whatever!).

How to send me a package:
Cheapest method depends on the weight of the items. At the post office the flat rate boxes are the cheapest if whatever it is will be heavy. If it’s not heavy it might be cheaper to just send it in your own box. I have not had ANY issues with receiving all of my mail. I have gotten some really big boxes of things and nothing has ever been opened or tampered with. For good measure if you want to put Bible verses on the box it can’t hurt. My address is:
Alana McGinty
PO Box 316
Alexandria 6185
South Africa

If you are interested in helping Noxolo and me with our project and want to send us some items please let me know so that I can update people so as to not get doubles of things. Please email me at alanamcginty@gmail.com if you are interested in supporting this project (financial contributions are also always welcome – please inquire via e-mail if you are interested)! : )

Thank you so much in advance for any help you can be – if you are unable to send physical things - any information if you can think of that would help us achieve our vision and mission (like an interesting article, a great website, or an organization that I could apply to for funding – PLEASE don’t hesitate to pass on the information). Your prayers and good thoughts are always appreciated as well!

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it" - Goethe