Amplify
Designing Spaces and Programs for Girls
Amplify is an annual national training program for girls’ program facilitators. Through our 5-day training supported by the Amplify Manual and ongoing follow-up sessions, facilitators learn how to start and sustain girls’ programs. Participants build facilitation and workshop/program design skills, while sharing resources, challenges and strategies.
AMPLIFY 2009
“Wow! So amazing. This has been unlike any other training I have attended I feel so grateful and lucky to have been part of such a powerful and informative training. Thank you Girls Action!”
Though we’ll take some of the credit, WOW and AMAZING are the words we use to describe the calibre of participants we had the pleasure of meeting at this year’s edition of the Amplify training.
Uniting 16 facilitators and girls’ programmers from across the country with differing levels of experience and from a wide variety of contexts, provided great opportunities for the exchange of resources, activities and ideas for programming. In a room literally surrounded by huge panes of glass looking out into the forest, Nisha Sajnani and Christine McKenzie epitomized the models of transparent facilitation and active learning as they led workshops on topics such as: how to design, start and sustain a girls program, organizational development from outreach, fundraising, networking through to evaluation, popular education and how to use it’s techniques in discussing violence prevention, self-esteem, anti-oppression, and most importantly, the essential keys to self-care. “By using different activities, such as role playing and theatre to engage young women, I can use these methods to engage and get to know the girls I work with”
Even though only a handful of the participants signed up to attend the retreat, those who had to leave were sad to say goodbye to the network of allies they had just discovered. Yet they left re-energized and inspired to keep working for the girls in their communities and turn the relationships they cultivated during the week into long-lasting partnerships in the future.
