The Omprakash Foundation

I wanted to contact you about a (not-for-profit) organization that I have founded that works to empower girls worldwide by connecting them to each other to learn about global issues and perform social change projects addressing these issues. I was very excited when I learned of your organization’s work and wanted to speak to you about possible collaboration or sponsorship or support of any other kind. As a passionate but still fledgling social entrepreneur, I would be deeply, profoundly grateful for any help or support at all I could obtain from successful organizations like yours. I know that you work with many schools and other organizations in developing countries, and I hoped you might be able to help connect me with any such of your partners that you think might benefit from my program, or else help me publicize my mission to such organizations.

Thus, I am including in this email a brief bio of myself to provide context and credibility and a basic information sheet about my organization.
Any response at all would be deeply appreciated.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you so much,
Sejal Hathi

Outline:

Name: Girls Helping Girls
Byline: Empower a girl, empower Her nation

Mission Statement: The mission of Girls Helping Girls is to build a global culture of girls consciously collaborating to make a difference. We strive not only to bridge international cultures but, more profoundly, to channel the power harvested from the girls’ collaborative service projects to Eradicate Poverty, Increase Access to Education, Improve Health, and- most importantly- Promote Peace.

Origins: Girls Helping Girls was founded in the summer of 2007 by then fifteen-year-old Sejal Hathi. It was accorded official status as an Ashoka’s Youth Venture organization in August 2007 and is presently applying for status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Sister Schools: Girls Helping Girls (GHG) is an organization based in San Jose, CA that partners girls in the San Francisco Bay Area with girls in schools, orphanages, and community organizations in developing countries to jointly identify problems in their communities and develop social change through microlending projects to address those issues.

GHG believes in a holistic education for all girls and therefore actively fundraises to send supplies and educational materials to its international locations. It is critical that the girls possess books, computers, school infrastructural materials and school supplies, and sometimes scholarships for the most deserving, to pursue their education and thus be more empowered to create social change. GHG aims to give them this power by fundraising to send those needed supplies. Right now, we are working in India, Turkey, and Ghana.

A Global Education: Because GHG believes that the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals are most apropos to an international project, it has, in partnership with the nonprofit Common Action, written and developed curriculum that expands upon four principal global issue domains that reflect and expand upon these MDG’s. These four domains are: Eradicating Poverty, Increasing Access to Education, Improving Health, and Promoting Peace. The curriculum features background information on each of the four topics and engaging reflection exercises and activities to help the participants connect to the issue. Preceding each curriculum guide- one for each domain- is a section that focuses specifically on Understanding Cultures and Building Cross-Cultural Communication. Many of the curriculum exercises are exchange activities- like writing a letter or creating a picture collage; thus, GHG will facilitate the exchanges between the two teams.

Empowering Girls as Changemakers: Five months into the service year, teams will be provided with a Social Change Toolkit to assist them in planning and implementing service projects to combat global issues. The local groups work together with those out of the states to determine what particular problem under their umbrella domain most deeply affects their communities, and then collaborate in a vibrant cultural exchange by email and/or postal service to develop an effective way to address this problem through a co- microlending and social change strategy. We have found that a very efficient way to accomplish this, is for the team in America to spread awareness and fundraise for a respective project, and for the team overseas to implement the project with those fundraised materials. For example, if the concerned global issue domain is education, the teams might select women’s right to education as their subsidiary problem to address and the team overseas might support, through microlending, an entrepreneur seeking to build a women’s vocational center with funds raised by the group in the USA. At the end of the service year, which will culminate on Global Youth Service Day in April, the girls will receive certificates of achievement and recognition for their work.

Methodology: We envision that the first five months of the service year will be spent on building a relationship between the two teams and on learning about their allotted global issue; the next four months will be spent working with the social change toolkits to create viable service projects that address the global issue. Throughout this process, we will have contacts in each of our international locations to provide feedback, updates, pictures, etc. and through which to dispatch funds and receive completed exercises. We are also launching a website in January, www.empoweragirl.org, where teams will post their reflections about their issue as well as any bios.

Needed Support: GHG would be deeply grateful to anyone- individuals or organizations or community groups- willing to support us in publicizing our mission or soliciting funds. As a passionate and responsible group of high school students, we would greatly appreciate any mentorship we can find.