This guide for youth workers shares our learnings on how to inspire young women’s leadership.
As youth workers supporting young women, we are always thinking of how to empower them and help them to overcome their challenges, so that they can thrive in their personal and professional lives, and have agency as citizens. The youth workers involved in the Red:GLOW network have worked together, sharing experiences to create a guide for other youth workers, to learn and share opportunities for young women to gain knowledge, leadership and citizenship skills.
The ideas in this guide are not prescriptive, because youth work and culture across Europe are different. They share ideas that all partners found to be effective, even if delivered in locally-appropriate ways, to inspire a whole-person and intersectional approach to young women’s leadership at school, in the workplace and in the activities that young women undertake during their free time. We want to showcase the value of informal and non-formal learning to developing young women’s development as leaders and citizens.
To download the document in English, Spanish, Italian, Latvia, Slovenian or Polish, please click on this link.
Using this guide
This guide aims to inspire other youth workers, and organisations supporting young women, we are sharing ideas and experiences, not instructions. Throughout the guide, you will find questions to reflect upon. They don’t need to be answered all at once, or in a particular order. We hope you can take our experience and relate it to yours.
You can reflect alone, but we have found, in preparing this, that spending time discussing these issues with other youth workers with a cup of tea is a great way to learn from each other and make your work more impactful. We hope that this reflection becomes part of your personal practice – supporting you to see the skills that you are developing yourself, appreciate your ongoing achievements, and learning from the challenges.
Youth work can be equal parts uplifting, frustrating, exhausting and joyous. Reflecting helps us to appreciate why it’s worth the effort so that we can inspire the next generation of young women.
We would love your feedback on this guide and hope to add to it in future. If you would also like to translate it into your own language please let us know. We would love to work with you to ensure that it is available to youth workers across Europe.
