Girl's Leadership

This year, SPARKS will bring together various girls from all across Boston, who will work together on leadership and community service projects. The program will meet monthly at various locations around the city, and participants can expect to acquire leadership skills, build compassion, meet new people, and make a positive impact on her community, her peers, and the world around her. Awesome, right!?

And if it doesn’t get better than that, upon being selected and completing the program, members will have an opportunity to apply for a 2017 SPARKS Scholarship.

The application is brief and the spots are limited. Please help us spread the word! Deadline: April 15th, 2017. SPARKS is open to any 13-19 year old who identifies as a young woman or girl.

Each year, we award educational scholarships prizes to ten finalists from our IGNITE Change Leadership Contest, and we go on to create a mentoring relationship between these girls and a member of our Organized Women network throughout the year.  Check out some pictures from past outings!

For anyone interested in joining our mentoring program, we recommend all volunteers join Organized Women first; our mentors are internally matched from our growing pool of OW members. 

APPLY TO BE A 2015 GAPP GIRL LEADER!

On September 18th, 2014, eleven girls and twelve female politicians gathered in Nurses Hall in the historic Massachusetts State House for a day of personal interviews, the first Girls About Political Participation (GAPP) Interview Day.  It was an incredible event--right on time, the legislators came down the stairs from their seats to find the girl they were matched with, and they spent more than an hour sharing experiences, discussing how they overcame their doubts and obstacles, and explaining how and why they got into politics.  The girls took furious notes, asking more questions, bonding with their legislator as they sat in Nurses Hall, the very first place in the State House where the contributions of women were honored.

After the interviews, Representative Ruth Balser led the girls on a tour of the State House, and it was then, as they walked through the hallowed halls and envisioned the possibility of their futures there, that one of the girls pointed to a chair at the front of the House of Representatives and said,

"That's my seat."

Now it's YOUR Turn!  Applications for the 2015 GAPP Program are now open!  

Applications are due September 5th!