Rosie's Girls

The Rosie's Girls® Summer Program is a three week summer day camp for early adolescent girls that encourages participants to develop and strengthen their capacities and confidence and helps them expand their perception of the range of educational and career options that are attainable. Using a unique, holistic approach, Rosie's Girls combines hands-on instruction in the skilled trades with a broad array of other activities explicitly designed to encourage girls to develop their own strength, power and confidence in an atmosphere that is fun, supportive, and positive.


The program has been carefully designed so that its activities work in concert with each other to provide a holistic, multi-faceted experience.

 

 

What Happens at Rosie's Girls?

Rosie's Girls campers have a chance to get their hands dirty, express themselves creatively and explore what the world has to offer them - and what they have to offer the world. Combining hands-on instruction in the skilled trades and technical fields with lots of arts activities and games, the program supports girls in finding their own strength, power and confidence in a fun, positive atmosphere. The program includes:

 

  • Carpentry and other skilled trades activities designed to encourage girls to develop their capacities and confidence and expose them to a range of STEM-(science, technology, engineering and math) related careers and educational paths considered "nontraditional" for girls and women.
    Besides carpentry, the Rosie's Girls Program may include a variety of other skilled trades areas including (but not limited to) welding, electrical wiring, fire fighting, bike repair, auto technician, engineering, and digital media.
  • Arts activities designed to encourage girls to promote individual expression through a variety of media. Activities may include: poetry, stand-up comedy, yoga, mask making, and collage making.
  • Physically challenging activities designed to encourage girls to set goals and push beyond preconceived boundaries and to build group cohesion and trust. These activities may include: ropes course, self defense, surfing or white water rafting.
  • "Girls World" activities designed to encourage girls to develop their understanding of societal expectations for women and girls and to actively question these assumptions. Some examples include:
    • Media Collage: An activity designed to help girls look critically at the portrayal of women in the media.
    • Woman of the Day: Each girl prepares a short presentation about a famous, successful woman of interest to her.
    • Mentor Presentations: Women who have chosen nontraditional occupations and/or educational paths speak about their careers and the challenges and opportunities they have faced.
  • Games and Initiatives: The Rosie's Girls day incorporates a variety of activities to help girls learn more effective communication skills and successful ways to work as a team (and have fun!).

 

Program Goals

Through all of these these activities, young girls are challenged to:

  • Develop a broader sense of their capacities and capabilities,
  • Consider careers in STEM-based, nontraditional fields,
  • Develop new areas of physical and emotional confidence,
  • Expand math and science skills through concrete applications, and
  • Push past preconceived limitations.


Why The Skilled Trades?

Skilled trades industries, including construction, are facing a major workforce shortage. Major challenges to combating this shortfall include negative perceptions about the industry and the difficulty of recruiting young and non-traditional workers, including women.


Girls in early adolescence have few, if any, opportunities to explore the skilled trades and related careers, nor are they often encouraged to pursue these careers. These careers often demand higher level math and science skills, which girls often lack due because they choose not to take these classes in high school.


The impact of this void is clear. Fewer than 5% of all students enrolled in high school construction or technical programs are girls. Thus, it is no surprise that in 2007, women made up only 3.1 percent of the construction workforce despite the fact that trades careers offer excellent wages and personally fulfilling and meaningful work -- to both men and women.


Rosie's Girls' singular aim is not for participants to decide that they want to become carpenters or mathematicians. Our intention is to use carpentry and other skilled trades and technical activities to help girls develop the capacities and confidence that will enable them to move about in the world with self-confidence and eagerness, with exposure to a broad range of educational and career options, and with a sense that they can be or do whatever they wish.


Why Middle School? Adolescence, Self-Efficacy and Aspirations

Girls in early adolescence are at a critical juncture in their lives - beginning to solidify their sense of who they are, what their interests are, and what they can become. During middle school, youth form strong and long-lasting ideas about what they believe they are capable of doing - self-efficacy. Girls in middle school and high school, for example, often report lower levels of self-efficacy in math and science and thus opt out of higher-level courses. This decision can have a significant impact on their career options, especially in high demand areas that require higher levels of math and science.


While many adults, including career development professionals, think of middle school as too early to begin career exploration and education, research has shown that it is precisely during these years that girls (and boys) begin to explore occupations and develop occupational aspirations and expectations. Rosie's Girls is designed to take girls at this crucial time in their development and engage them in tasks and activities that can enhance their development and give them skills and experiences that result in personal accomplishment and successful completion.


Further, the program's activities explicitly address issues of peer relationships, conflict management, sexism in the economy and the media, and perceptions of self. These activities build girls' self-confidence and self-efficacy and encourage them to believe they have the ability to be successful in a wide variety of tasks and STEM-related occupations.


Rosie's Girls Works

While the program components of Rosie's Girls are prescribed and designed to work together in synchronicity to create the whole experience, there is enough flexibility within each component to allow the individual site the freedom to tailor parts of the program to meet their own local needs. Because of this flexibility, this program has been successfully replicated in both urban and suburban environments with girls from a variety of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.


Program Outcomes: The majority of girls participating in Rosie's Girls enter the program expecting to learn carpentry skills. By the end of the program the majority of the girls do have mastery of a broad range of carpentry skills. More striking, however, is that many of the campers believe the most important thing they learned is that girls/women can do anything they want. In addition to learning specific skills, girls expressed pleasure in learning about teamwork and about themselves.


Surveys of campers and the adults in their lives indicate:


78% of parents/guardians reported that their daughter's perceptions of careers for girls/women and what girls/women can achieve after attending had changed as a result of participating in the program.

The number of girls who reported that they were not afraid to try new things increased by 20% during the course of the program

 

98% of the girls reported learning new skills in carpentry, including using a variety of hand and power tools

By program's end, a majority of girls expressed the belief that careers considered "nontraditional" for both men and women were open to both genders.

“I first attended Rosie's Girls as a seventh grader, the first year that the program ran, in Essex Jct. While I previously had a lot of experience working around tools and other machinery, it helped build my self-confidence learning how to use some new tools, especially doing things like welding. Team-building activities on the ropes course on one of the first days of camp taught me some leaderships skills, and also how to work better as part of a team.

When the Barre camp opened, I worked as a counselor in training (CIT), and a Junior Counselor. During my Junior Counselor year, I worked really hard to push myself beyond my comfort zone in leading the campers. Overall, I feel as though Rosie's Girls helped me gain some extremely valuable skills which have helped me getting into college and continuing my career. I also developed more of an interest in science and technology and how they are related to the trades. Also importantly, I was able to identify how important it is that women are not intimidated by male-dominated career fields, because in many cases that gives us a chance to excel and prove ourselves in a way that might not have otherwise occurred.

Also, just a footnote, I am currently an electrical engineering major/mathematics minor at Norwich University. It is something that I didn't necessarily plan on doing, but it is a lot of fun and is definitely something that I feel I can do well at and excel at, even though it has a very high male: female ratio!"

- 2000 camper