The Girls & Boys Projects was formed out of the Institute for Labor & the Community.
In 1997-1998, the Institute for Labor & the Community (ILC) was created to bring popular education techniques and activist programs to community based organizations, labor groups, and public schools located on New York City’s Lower East Side. Our mission is to promote social and economic justice by providing empowering educational and cultural programs that galvanize participants to change their lives individually and change society collectively.
Over the years, we have relied a great deal on the feedback we receive from collaborative organizations, our participants, and the community at large to guide our program’s depth, breadth and direction. For example, when there was a pronounced need for programs and materials pertaining to issues confronted by working men and women, the ILC responded by creating The Working Women’s Project and The Worker Health and Safety Project.
Through The Working Women’s Project, a project that was both a research and educational initiative, several programs and papers were produced addressing important and timely topics such as, sexual harassment at work, working women’s health and safety, as well as new office technology and its impact on women workers in the service sector. The Worker Health and Safety Project and later The Young Immigrant Worker Project included worker rights and occupational health and safety training sessions, corresponding educational videos, curricula, and workbooks such as, How to Prevent Violence in the Workplace; Repetitive Strain Injuries: How to Prevent RSI; and Stopping Stress at Work.
The Young Immigrant Project (YIP) emerged in response to many specific workplace and societal issues facing young immigrants in New York City. YIP now includes in-school and after-school gender-specific programs for immigrant high school students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens and has become part of The Girls & Boys Projects of the ILC.
In 1997-1998, The Girls Project began in response to the urgent request by a local Lower East Side school principal whose fifth and sixth grade girls were being harassed by boys on the playground and in the hallways of her school. Parents and educators in the community also expressed a need to maintain girls’ selfconfidence and to address the many negative influences that seem to make girls more concerned with what they look like than who they are. The ILC responded to these concerns with the creation of The Girls Project, a 25-week program for public school girls examining topics pertinent to girls through participatory discussion, arts activities, and advocacy in the community. Over the past ten years, The Girls Project has been instituted in dozens of elementary, middle, and high schools, and has positively impacted thousands of girls.
Once The Girls Project was successfully implemented in public schools throughout the community, it became more than obvious that an additional program specifically targeting boys was also needed. Soon after The Boys Project, a program for public school boys that explores coming of age issues through a series of creative and participatory workshops, was piloted in one elementary school on the Lower East Side. To date, The Boys Project has also reached thousands of boys in school throughout New York City and beyond.
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