The Athena Program

Vital Stats

Tara V

Cambridge, MA

  • people helped235
  • People Doing It 41

The Problem

The Athena Program connects the community of at-risk urban young women of color from the cities of Boston and Cambridge and a diverse community of undergraduate mentors from Harvard College and other Boston-area colleges. The program tries to fill the gap from the continued lack of girls’ programming in the Greater Boston area. As one participant observes, “There is always a need for gender issue programs in the community, especially for girls, because often times they lack good role models and thus get lost in translation during high school.” The Boston Black Ministerial Alliance’s “Report on High Risk Girls and Gender Specific Programming” calls attention to the huge increase in young women’s committing violence and getting arrested in 2008; they likewise highlight internal risk factors— eating disorders, mental health, depression—which urban young women are often more likely to be at-risk for. The Athena Program, thought mentoring and conferences, provides vital programming to at-risk high school girls to empower them as members of their community.

Plan of Action

1) In fall 2009, I expanded the Athena Program from an organization that merely ran two semiannual conferences to found our mentoring program, building a stronger base for young women and college undergrads to organize together around gender issues. 2) By spring 2010, over half of the workshops in the semiannual Conference were facilitated by mentees. 3) By spring 2011, all of the workshops in the Conference will be facilitated by mentees and half of the workshops in the program will be facilitated by mentees. In order to do this, we will devote program time towards research, designing and peer-reviewing workshops and also site-visiting other organizations A pilot group of mentees planned and executed an action project. 4) By summer 2011, a pilot version of summer Athena will include 15 girls who will conduct a needs assessment and then implement an action project around a gender or community based issue. 5) By fall 2011, mentees will continue to facilitate all of the Conference workshops and take on the role of facilitating all the mentoring workshops, with mentor support. Each of the twenty mentees will also commit to and execute a yearlong organizing campaign. Because I am a senior, new undergraduate leaders will have successfully taken over the program and new youth participants would have the groundwork I established to continue their work.
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Discrimination
Women's Rights

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