Profile

Girls Leading Girls is a Bay Area nonprofit with a mission to train girls ages 5-17 in leadership and life skills through soccer with all female coaches. We operate several soccer programs aimed at helping female identified and gender expansive youth… Girls Leading Girls is a Bay Area nonprofit with a mission to train girls ages 5-17 in leadership and life skills through soccer with all female coaches. We operate several soccer programs aimed at helping female identified and gender expansive youth grow as individuals, become leaders, and learn soccer. Our three largest programs are our club soccer teams, our free after school programs, and our summer camps. We also train women from the communities we serve and offer them paid coaching jobs. We serve over 500 girls annually across all programs.
Our unique approach uses soccer as a vehicle to teach leadership and advocacy skills which includes a trauma-informed lens to help ensure girls' physical and social-emotional safety. Through a partnership with Futures Without Violence, our soccer and leadership programming includes trauma-informed violence awareness and prevention training, delivered by relatable women role models.
Our programs aim to improve mental and physical wellness, self-worth, dropout rates of girls in sports and school, lack of representation of women in leadership, and generational poverty by keeping girls in school, providing them with a safe space to learn and grow, and employing an innovative community-centered approach. Our work has a double impact starting with preventative holistic health focusing on mental, emotional, physical health for girls and gender expansive BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) youth; and economic and educational support to help girls and gender expansive BIPOC youth thrive into adulthood. Our curriculum covers topics that help girls lead healthy and empowered lives, including nutrition, confidence, anti-racism, gender identity, social justice, goal setting, career mapping, body image, peer pressure, team building, peer to peer relationships, conflict resolution, gender equality, and higher education. These skills are further reinforced on the soccer pitch. We use the US Soccer Federation curriculum for all soccer skills taught, which include basic fitness, agility, dribbling, shooting, passing, and goalkeeping. We also provide nutritious snacks to participants.
We partner with the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts to deliver our free after school programs at disadvantaged public schools. We also partner with community agencies like Bay Area Community Resources and Mission Graduates to ensure our programming is relevant to the diverse communities we serve. We additionally collaborate with local changemakers through partnerships with organizations like the Alliance for Girls. In addition to our program's impact on the girls we serve, we also aim to create jobs for women and strategies for independence for survivors of violence through a partnership with La Casa De Las Madres.
When we talk to the families we serve about their barriers, they share a lack of access to reliable transportation, to places to play outside, to opportunities to join team sports, training on topics related to life skills, and to safe places to go after school. Many face food and housing insecurity. These challenges are compounded by intersectional issues like income, race, immigration status, and gender. Most importantly, the girls we serve and their families are resilient, strong, and determined to thrive. We're honored to support their strengths through community-collaborative soccer and leadership programming.
Surveys from program participants demonstrate the profound effect that Girls Leading Girls has on girls' lives, with 100% of participants sharing that they felt more confident as a person and 78% indicating that they wanted to attend college and play soccer at that level in our 2019 post program survey. We have found that integrating leadership, soccer, and advocacy together has given us an 80% retention rate. We also maintain a 7:1 ratio of youth to staff to increase the coach to youth relationship bond.