Rosa grantee Chyloe Powell is co-founder of BelEve: an organisation set up to empower young women. Rosa talks to her about the inspiration behind BelEve and what receiving a grant from Rosa has enabled them to achieve.
I am one of four sisters and we grew up in a London borough where there is a lot of poverty and single-parent families. There is a lack of aspiration too, because young girls are growing up seeing one narrative, so we wanted to create a space where we can say: “This is where you are now, but it doesn’t have to be where you end up”.
My sister created a programme called Pathway to Success and we wanted to tap into who the girls are and what it means to be a girl. What are the challenges they will face and how are they going to overcome them? It’s about building up their soft skills; how do we make them feel confident and instil self-esteem? How do we get young girls to see what healthy relationships look like with their families, their peers, the opposite sex? We decided to build a programme dealing with those issues and we drafted a proposal for the council which was accepted.
After the sudden death of our mother in 2012, we realised how important it is to have a positive female role model in your life, to instil the importance of courage and the power of exercising your voice. We channelled our grief into something positive and created BelEve. We thought of the name in brainstorming sessions when the word ‘believe’ kept coming up, as our fundamental motivation was to teach young girls to believe in themselves first. Then my sister suggested to remove the letter ‘i’ and of course, ‘Eve’ was the first woman, so BelEve was born!
We are so grateful for the grants from Rosa. The first grant helped us with Lead Your Ship: a programme in secondary schools, about getting young people to lead themselves, working around self-development, mentoring and leadership. The grant enabled us to hire a facilitator for those sessions and help out with admin and I also hired a mentor, which was so valuable – when you’re leading an organisation, you also need someone as a soundboard to help steer you in the right direction. She helped me with my strategic thinking, where we were at in our organisation, where I hope to be, what steps I need to put in place to get there, and looking at time-management. I’ve been able to network with other organisations through Rosa too; it can be lonely when you’re such a small organisation but having the chance to meet and talk through things with other people really helps. The training Rosa offers is great too – I love the webinars!
Our first programme was about getting young people not in education, training or employment back on a positive path, whatever that meant to them. We ran that for 12 weeks and lots of different issues came out of that – we had girls who were living with domestic abuse, self-harming and lack of confidence due to different things that have happened. It was about telling them that we’re all starting from ground zero and we’re going to build our way up from there. At the end of the 12 weeks, 80% of them got work experience and we still see a lot of them now – that was six years ago. Most of them are working or have gone back into education, which is great.
Our second grant from Rosa, from the Justice and Equality Fund, is going towards planning workshops around sexual harassment for young girls – they think it’s normal, so it’s about raising awareness and equipping them to deal with it. We’re also hoping to run a holiday camp in the summer to take up to 20 girls away from their everyday environment, who wouldn’t usually be able to have a holiday, offering them the chance to play sports and do workshops, such as cooking and crafts. Watch this space!
To find out more, visit www.beleveuk.org and follow BelEve on Twitter @BelEveUK