AFYW seeks to raise awareness and address gender equity barriers to girl’s education by engaging the girls themselves in analysis and advocacy using STEM tools and methodologies. Queens Community House is committed to the personal growth of the diverse people it serves and to the creation of self-reliant, open, responsible communities. We operate 40 programs at 21 sites including children and youth services; community services; and senior services. AFYW is consistent with the agency goal of empowering people to take action together to improve issues that they identify, providing both a mechanism for voice and agency and the necessary supports to achieve their goals.

Problem

QCH serves central Queens neighborhoods representing some of the most ethnically diverse communities in the country. Our client base includes families from more than 86 countries and speaking more than 27 languages. AFYW participants reflect this diversity. Approximately 75% are immigrants or first generation Americans; two thirds of whom speak at least one other language at home. The majority is from low-income, working immigrant families.Within the community planning board # 4 that comprises a core service area, one in five residents are at the poverty level. 59% are foreign born. One in 3 lack health insurance; 60% are more likely to be uninsured than those in NYC overall. AFYW addresses the issues facing low-income girls of different cultures living in our community. For these young women, cultural expectations and family responsibilities may limit participation in outside activities or preclude higher education and aspirations for professional employment. Language barriers can complicate their engagement in youth development programming as well as their integration into a peer group.Among girls in our community, dowry practices and early marriages are a significant cause of interrupted education; therefore the development of a girls’ voice is essential to addressing their academic success. Our partner high schools suffer from graduation rates below 70% and refer girls at risk of dropping out. AFYW's context in a multi-service agency that serves parents of many prospective youth participants, enables us to serve these young women from a foundation of trust. We are able to engage young women whose immigrant parents are generally wary of letting them participate in afternoon and evening activities outside of school because they know the Community House from adult education, housing or other programs that have served them well.

Solution

The uniqueness of AFYW is that girls address barriers to STEM careers and advanced education themselves, developing social competencies to assert their interests as they build academic skills in STEM. AFYW addresses the well-documented national trend that beginning in middle school, many girls express a dislike of math, science, and technology, or perceive themselves as “not good” in these subjects. They take fewer advanced math and science courses in high school and earn a lesser percentage of undergraduate and advanced degrees in math, science and engineering. We target girls during the critical ages of 12 to 18 and help them examine their self-imposed limits. The premise of our approach is that implementing gender equity in schools requires an informed group of advocates who are knowledgeable about barriers and able to advocate as community leaders to ensure legal protections for those affected.

Example

AFYW engages teen girls to think critically about their education and career prospects through a lens of gender equity utilizing the tools and methodologies of scientific inquiry, research reviews, data collection and analysis and critical thinking as well as technology. AFYW operates year-round and is designed to engage girls in the middle school years and maintain their involvement through high school. QCH, with the aid of a curriculum developer, designed age-appropriate 20-week curricula of increasing sophistication for girls ages 12 – 14 and 15 - 18; and intermediate and advanced courses for previous participants. Through the curriculum, participants build and utilize skills - critical thinking, leadership, data collection, and goal-setting while also examining gender bias. Topics addressed include Title IX; discrimination based on gender, racial/ethnic background or immigration status; non-traditional careers for women, college and educational options, and leadership development. QCH staff are trained to acknowledge participants experiences of gender bias in the context of different cultural values and immigrant experience. Young women discuss, analyze, research, and write about the topics. Since 2005, the program has had a focus on STEM education and careers and the barriers and opportunities for women in those areas. The culmination is an annual, full-day Youth Leadership Conferenceplanned and executed by participants and attended by several hundred youth, adults and policy makers from throughout the city. Participants create workshop presentations on their selected topics. They form committees and assign responsibility for all facets of the conference from creating the invitations to introducing speakers and researching, planning and presenting the workshops offered. In addition to offering the young women the opportunity to develop leadership and advocacy skills, the conference provides a public forum for them to present their findings on gender and educational issues. It serves to open up dialogue between AFYW participants and decision-makers from their schools and communities on the topic of gender equity.As a follow up to the conference, they create a Facebook page that brings together conference materials and general information about gender equity and STEM education. With help from an outside evaluator, data were collected through a comprehensive program evaluation including pre and post surveys of school-year participants, staff and evaluator observations, interviews, focus groups and presentations on gender bias and equity at the program’s annual culminating event, as well as four in-depth case studies with participants over a three year period. In the past years, we have also reviewed performance by participants on the statewide proficiency assessment tests. Over the period from 2005-2009, 305 young women ages 12-18 completed the Access for Young Women program. Some highlights from evaluation results that illustrate program impact: • 75% of students served by the AFYW program achieved proficiency on state mathematics assessments and 88% on state science assessments. • 100% demonstrated statistically significant higher mean increases in achievement compared to mean increases of a comparison group on pre and post tests data. • 100% also demonstrated proficiency on New York State Performance Standard #7 for mathematics, science and technology: they learn to apply the knowledge and thinking skills of mathematics, science and technology to address real life problems and make informed decisions. • Many of the students received higher report card grades in math and science after a few months of regular participation in the AFYW program this year. School attendance improved as well. Official year-end grades and attendance and self-reports indicated that almost all students have shown improvement. Attendance and report card grades are generally correlated with Regents test scores. • Students said they specifically joined the program because they would have opportunities to be tutored regularly in the math and science subjects they were taking in school. Teachers in those subjects referred students to the program. Participants noted that what helped them learn concepts was that they were shown the relevance of those subjects to their lives. • The program facilitators have been explicitly incorporating national high school science standards into sessions. With help from an outside evaluator, data were collected through a comprehensive program evaluation including pre and post surveys of school-year participants, staff and evaluator observations, interviews, focus groups and presentations on gender bias and equity at the program’s annual culminating event, as well as four in-depth case studies with participants over a three year period. In the past years, we have also reviewed performance by participants on the statewide proficiency assessment tests. Over the period from 2005-2009, 305 young women ages 12-18 completed the Access for Young Women program. Some highlights from evaluation results that illustrate program impact: • 75% of students served by the AFYW program achieved proficiency on state mathematics assessments and 88% on state science assessments. • 100% demonstrated statistically significant higher mean increases in achievement compared to mean increases of a comparison group on pre and post tests data. • 100% also demonstrated proficiency on New York State Performance Standard #7 for mathematics, science and technology: they learn to apply the knowledge and thinking skills of mathematics, science and technology to address real life problems and make informed decisions. • Many of the students received higher report card grades in math and science after a few months of regular participation in the AFYW program this year. School attendance improved as well. Official year-end grades and attendance and self-reports indicated that almost all students have shown improvement. Attendance and report card grades are generally correlated with Regents test scores. • Students said they specifically joined the program because they would have opportunities to be tutored regularly in the math and science subjects they were taking in school. Teachers in those subjects referred students to the program. Participants noted that what helped them learn concepts was that they were shown the relevance of those subjects to their lives. • The program facilitators have been explicitly incorporating national high school science standards into sessions.

Marketplace

Shrinking government funding is the primary challenge to the development of our program. Our commitment is to offer the same core program, though scaled back to serve a smaller number of youth at fewer locations (one community and one school-based site). Our plan is to continue to aggressively seek out new funding opportunities. An unexplored resource is the alumna from the past years of programming who may be willing to become individual donors to a program that supported their early success. Recently, a graduate of the Video and Photography summer component who is a professional camerawoman spoke to participants about her career. The alumnae are an untapped resource both as mentors and program enhancement presenters and as potential financial donors. In addition, our board of directors is focusing more heavily upon individual and corporate donors who find AFYW very appealing as a program to support. We will also continue to seek opportunities for government support particularly with the recent surge of interest in STEM. For instance, our agency can subcontract directly with schools to operate program activities, as we do with the remaining school-based site. Our partnerships include high schools from throughout the borough of Queens, New York. These include those at which we have run programs on site and those whose students we serve in our programs. AFYW has operated school-based sites at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica; Newtown High School, in Elmhurst, Newcomers High School in Long Island City, and VOYAGES High School, a Department of Education-funded transfer school operated by QCH that is an alternative school for students behind in credit accumulation. In addition, we collaborate with Forest Hills High School, Queens Academy, the High School for Arts and Business, Jamaica High School, Townsend Harris, John Bowne and Bryant High school. We also collaborate with and serve students from MS 157, IS 61 and 5, and JHS 217. All of these serve low-income immigrant youth. We enjoy collaborative relationships with these schools' faculty and staff who refer young women to our program and work with our staff around goals for engaging girls in STEM activities. QCH staff also meet with representatives of the two community colleges in Queens. We also share information through citywide organizations such as United Neighborhood Houses, an umbrella organization of settlement houses, and the Youth Development Institute, an national organization that addresses youth development and education. Each year AFYW program staff and evaluator have presented to organizations on best practices in gender equity programming, a total of 141 community-based organizations, educators, policy makers, public officials, youth and program staff have taken part in presentations or trainings offered through QCH staff including: • The youth programming funding allocations committee at New York Women’s Foundation for two years in a row; • Information was shared with organizations in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens through the Independence Fund Roundtable for women leaders. Most participants were female executives of two dozen emerging and established organizations serving women and girls. • 30 CBO’s through Partnership for Afterschool Education’s (PASE) Opportunities for All forum on girls programming; • 80 policy makers, educators, and public officials at a Drop Out Prevention Summit sponsored by America’s Promise in NYC in March 2009; • New York Association of Youth Boards annual conference to an audience of over 30 members and representatives of government Youth Boards that are responsible for the coordination and funding of youth programs in their counties as well as program managers and staff throughout the state. • Over 20 organizations at a statewide conference sponsored by the NYS Department of Education for grantees of the 21st Century Learning Communities