By Sydney Williams
Alliance for Girls 2018 annual members meeting in San Francisco, California. Photo by Jonaz Dela Cruz.
Alliance for Girls is the largest alliance of girl-serving organizations in the country. When the pandemic hit, they were well-positioned to jump into action to understand and support the unique needs of girls and gender-expansive youth during this time of crisis. Going to the source, they launched a peer group survey and released this timely report, ‘Uniting Isolated Voices: Girls and Gender-Expansive Youth During COVID-19’ to give insights about struggles with isolation, mental health impacts, extra childcare burdens, loss of independence, lack of access to supportive community organizations, and other impacts. With this data, Alliance for Girls is reaching out to policymakers, government agencies and organizations to create infrastructure and programs tailored to meet these needs right away.
Emma Mayerson, founding Executive Director of Alliance for Girls. Photo courtesy of Alliance for Girls
How did they do it? After conducting wellness checks with 23 girls of color in the San Francisco Bay Area, Alliance for Girls decided to go deeper and tap their existing Youth Participatory Action Research Program to conduct a new mode of research to learn more about the status of girls’ needs with the added pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic. From March 2020 to June 2021 a group of six girls led the design and execution of the research. Their findings informed the development of Alliance for Girls’ report, Uniting Isolated Voices: Girls and Gender-Expansive Youth During COVID-19.
With this report, Alliance for Girls is sharing key findings from their new data collection to inform policy makers and government agencies and focus attention on the glaring disparities that have worsened for girls during the COVID-19 pandemic. This ‘Uniting Isolated Voices’ report has been the first time that many of these influential people and organizations are seeing hard facts on the true circumstances facing the young female population.
Many lower socioeconomic families rely heavily on family members for childcare, a result of rising costs of childcare in nearly every state. During the pandemic, many essential workers began having to pull extra hours and shifts to cover for colleagues falling ill or to fill in for workers who had increased caregiving responsibilities at home. With these changing circumstances, girls who were at home because of distance learning often had to pick up the slack while working-age family members were on the job or ill. This role that young girls have come to fill has come at a cost, as many school age girls are now dealing with new or increased strain on their academic success and mental health.
Now, just as California had been finally allocating more resources to the prosperity of young girls, their needs have been exacerbated by the pandemic. With women and girls bearing the heaviest burden of pandemic fall out, they should be centered in conversations during this time, finding the best solutions to support families and reduce the caregiving burden on women and girls.
Purpose
The title ‘Uniting Isolated Voices’ comes from the idea of taking a collaborative approach to addressing increased feelings of isolation among girls since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and, as the report says, to serve as an “inflection point for girls, their allies, and leaders across sectors as they begin to design and resource a vision for a better future – one that does not repeat the mistakes of the past nor re-create the same systemic and institutional barriers and burdens for girls.”
The purpose of funding, conducting, and analyzing this report is to identify what girls are experiencing during stay-at-home orders, what they need to be and feel better supported, and what calls for action most desperately need to be answered to effect positive change.
1,214 girls were surveyed, 40% of girls taking the survey live in Oakland and/or attend Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Most of the other respondents were concentrated around the Bay Area, while 29% live in other parts of California. Despite the close proximity of those taking the survey, their report is statistically representative of what girls in large, urban settings are experiencing.
The Facts
After analyzing the survey results, it was found that girls were able to identify multiple negative effects spanning their school, home, and social lives. According to the report, a majority of girls (66%) feel greater stress or anxiety since the shelter-in-place restrictions began. Almost half (44%) say that they now have more caregiving duties than before. About one in three (32%) girls report being negatively impacted by news and media coverage about COVID-19, and nearly the same amount (30%) say they are unable to get the learning support they need right now.
In addition to the concerning upward trending rates of strain, the COVID-19 report (Figure 20.) illustrates the growing feelings of isolation, difficulty with emotional coping, and loss of motivation and enrichment. Not to mention an increase in barriers to basic needs, pressure around school, and other staggering challenges.
These feelings of isolation and more are, unfortunately, not unfounded. Of girls surveyed, 32% reported lacking financial stability and nearly 20% don’t have proper access to services, health products or internet to participate in online schooling. (Figure 8.)
The data calls the community to action, outlining three major areas that will lead to a system shift toward gender equity in public schooling.
Calls to Action
Redefine Schools as Ecosystems for Girls’ Wellness
Schools should invest in building out and advancing physical and virtual services and infrastructure that support girls’ safety, social and emotional wellbeing, coordinated specialized services, and enrichment opportunities (Uniting Isolated Voices Report, 2021).
Schools serve as more of a resource to girls than just a place where they recieve in-person instruction from teachers. Girls say that their schools are beneficial to them as a space outside of the home where they can find privacy, distinct areas to study and explore identity, interact and connect with peers and caring adults, play sports, do enrichment and after school activities, and access counseling and other specialized services. These are all important factors in opening doors for personal and intellectual growth for young women.
The approach is to position schools to provide uninterrupted support, regardless of a pandemic, natural disaster, or family emergency. We have the technological capability to do this, now we need the infrastructure to make it happen.
By rolling out strategies to bring this uninterrupted support to fruition, AFG will be able to better support the most underserved groups of girls who have been adversely affected during stay-at-home orders. Some of those strategies include:
Building coalitions between schools and girls’ service providers to create a true continuum of services by establishing, integrating, and expanding mental health and trauma-informed counseling, practices, and infrastructure into school-day learning and out-of-school time
Integrating a broader continuum of caregiving support to young parents and families
Increasing internet access and connectivity at outdoor school spaces
Leverage Policy and Advocacy Organizations as True Allies
Policy and advocacy organizations should align on critical issues, led by girls’ voices around what they perceived as their hardest-hit areas as a result of COVID-19 (Uniting Isolated Voices Report, 2021).
The purpose of conducting this study and creating this report is of dual purpose: to identify the exacerbated needs of girls during the COVID-19 pandemic and to serve as a resource and reference for policymakers and advocacy organizations for new legislation and policy.
The goal is to provide continuous system reinforcements for the most underserved groups of girls. The strategies to achieve this are to:
Relieve unequal caregiving burdens by advocating for national paid sick leave, paid family leave, and subsidized daycare and preschool. And to include girls into the caregiver policy conversation as they are often expected to serve as the key caregivers in their families and communities
Create and adequately resource more dedicated, physical spaces where girls can feel safe, be themselves, and not worry about judgment or expectations
Increase government and systemic efforts to consistently collect more girl-centered data to better support and understand the experiences, challenges, and needs of girls
Provide Dedicated Funding to Uplifting Girls
Funders now have clear and targeted ways they can provide funding and resources based on exactly what girls say they need and how it will support them (Uniting Isolated Voices Report, 2021).
Just as everything is political, everything always comes back down to funding. The fact of the matter is that the strong public systems that actually address the most pressing needs of girls are extremely underfunded, and have been since long before the pandemic began.
Strategies to better fund schools and other public services include:
Prioritize funding for organizations specifically addressing the direct negative impacts of COVID-19 on girls and eliminating the barriers for safety and healthy relationships
Fund intergenerational (i.e. parents, guardians, caregivers, adults) learning and service delivery to recognize the family and community context in which girls are served and to redistribute the burden of growth, change, and healing for girls
Involve girls and girl-serving organizations in decisions about funding priorities, strategy, outcomes, and gaps and provide more flexible funding and operational funding for organizations serving girls
If there is one thing to notice about all the findings and suggested courses of action laid out by the Uniting Isolated Voices: Girls and Gender-Expansive Youth During COVID-19 report, it is that no one has said this will be easy. This is the beginning of understanding which gaps need to be filled most urgently, pointing communities to good places to start taking action. Now the challenge is up to Californians to maximize a unified commitment to invest in young women and girls.
All quotes and references in this article are to the Uniting Isolated Voices: Girls and Gender-Expansive Youth During COVID-19 report released in August 2021 by Alliance for Girls.