Girls empowerment network's mission is to ignite power in girls by teaching them skills to thrive and believe in their ability to be unstoppable

We accomplish this through delivering our self-efficacy building curriculum at schools, camps, and conferences. Our largest service is our girl connect program on school campuses (most of them title 1). Through girl connect, we are giving girls a strong belief in themselves (self-efficacy), which has an important impact on academic success, future career achievement, and lifting women and girls (and thereby more of society overall) out of poverty. The vista project aligns with the education priority area and would directly contribute to "k-12 success in student educational and behavioral outcomes in low-achieving schools." girl connect programming supports girls in increased positive school functioning and decreased disciplinary referrals. The vista project will support growth/capacity of girl connect and will seek to increase our organizational scale/reach to result in more volunteers supporting our work, greater community awareness/engagement with our mission, and increased financial resources. This will allow US to ultimately serve many more girls in the austin and houston communities with this life changing content through girl connect. Our hope was to reach at least 1,200 girls in austin and 400 girls in houston with girl connect services in the first year and for that to incrementally increase each year after. 5 vista members (2 in houston and 3 in austin) contributed to these goals by performing key activities aimed at assessing, improving, and scaling our fundraising, community engagement, and operational activities. We have now been offered a support grant and will be expanding our vista program to include 1 vista leader and 7 vista members, all of whom will help grow our capacity and sustainability over the course of the placement. Response during covid-19 pandemic: on march 13, 2020, girls empowerment network pivoted. We went from working directly with thousands of girls and their families via in-person programming to providing virtual connection and support programs for those same families and beyond. Our organization considered how we can meet the most critical needs of our girls even as we face covid-19. We have leaned into what we do best and converted our services to reach girls no matter where they are. According to the national institute of health, high stress times like covid-19 puts extra pressure on families, and our communities experience increased rates of alcoholism, drug use, domestic violence and sexual violence. In fact, unicef and many other sources confirm that these issues are rising now. Shelter-in-place gives abusers more opportunity to isolate family members while at the same time our girls can't access their usual support systems. An elevated percentage of our girls are at risk of becoming victims of these issues. Some of our girls will run away – a dangerous but rational coping method for dealing with abuse at home. Covid-19 exacerbates all the illness, homelessness, arrest, and trauma that comes with running away. Additionally, according to the FBI, girls are at increased risk of human trafficking as they are spending more time online, feeling a need for connection as a result of sheltering-in-place during this pandemic. Even in normal circumstances, our girls are in need of a healthy connection outside of their homes to combat the negative effects of stress and anxiety (a significant risk factor for girls of any background.) the pandemic heightens all of this. For some girls, stress and anxiety will present through self-injurious behaviors like disordered eating, poison, cutting and pills. We are most concerned about this because the research shows even when our communities are not experiencing pressure from covid-19, girls are more prone to self-harm than boys as a coping skill for stress and anxiety. In fact, according to the…