Raising Voices: Creating a Safe Space for Girls to Speak Out guides the reader through a unique creative process that successfully helps teenage girls discover ways to better understand the issues and overcome obstacles that affect their lives and their communities. The book explains how the authors started and built their own program for girls; gives explicit, step-by-step instructions for organizing and implementing a program for girls; and offers stories and writing examples that illustrate how teaching artists, counselors, and teen participants collaborate to make art and, in the process, strengthen the participants' autonomy and sense of self.

2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title From Eleanor Roosevelt to feminist icon Gloria Steinem to HIV/AIDS activist Dazon Dixon Diallo, women have assumed leadership roles in struggles for social justice. How did these remarkable women ascend to positions of influence? And once in power, what leadership strategies did they use to deal with various challenges? Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements explores these questions by introducing twelve women who have spearheaded a wide array of social movements that span the 1940s to the present, working for indigenous peoples’ rights, gender equality, reproductive rights, labor advocacy, environmental justice, and other causes. The women profiled here work in a variety of arenas across the globe: Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards, New York City labor organizer Bhairavi Desai, women’s rights leader Charlotte Bunch, feminist poet Audre Lorde, civil rights activists Daisy Bates and Aileen Clarke Hernandez, Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai, Nicaraguan revolutionary Mirna Cunningham, and South African public prosecutor Thuli Madonsela. What unites them all is the way these women made sacrifices, asked critical questions, challenged injustice, and exhibited the will to act in the face of often-harsh criticism and violence. The case studies in Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements demonstrate the diversity of ways that women around the world have practiced leadership, in many instances overcoming rigid cultural expectations about gender. Moreover, the cases provide a unique window into the ways that women leaders make decisions at moments of struggle and historical change.

For too long, women have been told to confine themselves-physically, socially, and emotionally. Eliza VanCort says now is the time for women to stand tall, raise their voices, and claim their space. Women fight the pressure to make themselves small in private, professional, and public spaces. VanCort, a teacher, consultant, and speaker, provides the necessary tools for women to rewrite the rules and create the stories of their choosing safely and without apology. VanCort identifies the five key behaviors of all Space-Claiming Queens: use your voice and posture to project confidence and power, end self-sabotage, forge connections, neutralize unsafe spaces, and unite across differences. Through personal narrative, research, and actionable strategies, VanCort provides how-tos on combating challenges, such as antimentors and microaggressions, and gives advice for building up your old girls club, asking for what you're worth, and owning your space without apology. Bold, fun, and enlightening, this book is birthed from VanCort's incredible story. Having a mother with schizophrenia forced VanCort to learn to be small and invisible at an early age, and suffering a traumatic brain injury as an adult required her to rethink communication from the ground up. Drawing on these experiences, and those of real women everywhere, VanCort empowers women to claim space for themselves and for their sisters with courage, empathy, and conviction because when we rise together, we rise so much higher.

It can be hard to speak up when power dynamics keep us silent and marginalized, especially when race, ethnicity, and gender are factors. Activist Kathy Khang roots our voice and identity in the image of God, showing how we can raise our voices for the sake of God's justice. We are created to speak, and we can both speak up for ourselves and speak out on behalf of others.

Discover how girls develop a sense of self as they struggle to make sense of complex and complicated times Working Relationally with Girls: Complex Lives, Complex Identities examines the experience of being a girl in today’s society and the difficulties social work practitioners face in developing a universal theory that represents that experience. This unique book analyzes how—and why—gender is still a complicated barrier for most girls, despite living in “post-feminist” times. Working from a variety of orientations, the book offers practical suggestions on how to help girls deal with interpersonal tensions, interpersonal conflicts, relational dilemmas, and the difficulties that stem from rules and norms of what is still a male-dominated society. Human service practitioners, regardless of their fields, face an everyday struggle to understand how adolescent girls construct identities in relation to the culture in which they live. The contributors to Working Relationally with Girls call on a range of disciplines, including child and youth care, cultural studies, feminist theory, counseling, and social psychology, to examine how girls interpret cultural expectations to develop a sense of self under complex conditions. This unique book addresses the subtle—and not-so-subtle—practices (symbols, metaphors, images, scripts, rules, norms, and narratives) that shape girls’ lives, providing the tools to build a basic framework that will help you understand how girls are alike—and how they’re different. Working Relationally with Girls examines: how mothers and daughters perceive general differences regarding sexual experiences in adolescence how girls’ health issues are constructed within the context of their dating relationships what do mothers and daughters want to know about each other’s sexuality the difficulty girls have in articulating their needs and desires in romantic relationships how many girls deal with what they see as an impossible choice—compromising their sense of self to maintain a relationship or compromising the relationship to maintain their sense of self how the dynamics of a dating relationship can affect a girl’s development and health the influence of media on constructing an identity how minorities form an identity when dealing with exclusion and belonging in a predominately white community using theater to examine the experience of identity formation and much more! Working Relationally with Girls is an essential guide to understanding how girls make sense of the world and how their decisions affect their gender and identity development. Social workers, health care professionals, child and youth care practitioners, and counselors will find this rich combination of theory and practice invaluable as an everyday resource.

This book is his moving account of discovering healthy masculinity from the inside out. His journey has been sensational at times and unbelievable at others, but for many readers, it has been absolutely inspiring. Will the hungry wolves outlast the desire to be loving and beautiful? Can men truly change? What role can men play in making the world safe for women? We lose so many men. Not everyone finds their way to the other side. Yet there is hope in witnessing the depth and commitment of a person willing to try to be better without knowing exactly how. This memoir captures one man’s struggle to transcend his past and imagine an entirely new future for himself premised on compassion, care, and advocacy. This is a story about hope. We do not have to be what they did to us, but it's our responsibility to do something about it. I wish for you to experience feeling loved, accepted, respected, and connected and to live a life of being the person you always knew you could be.

What is the link between information communication technology and women's empowerment in today's development context? How can ICT facilitate the pursuit of a better world? Exploring the rich complexity of the contexts in which they live and work, the authors of Women and ICT in Africa and the Middle East offer a multitude of perspectives and experiences, avoiding simplistic answers and solutions. Based on analyses from twenty-one research teams in fourteen countries, this much-needed, human-centred contribution to the fields of gender, development and information communication technology questions, demonstrates and suggests what it takes to wield the emancipatory potential of ICT.