Since its founding in 1999, Oasis For Girls has provided life skills, arts, and leadership training for at-risk, low-income girls of color and immigrant girls throughout San Francisco. Our mission is to partner with under-resourced girls and young women to help them discover opportunities and explore their dreams. Our youth-development programs provide a safe space to cultivate the skills, knowledge, and confidence to build strong futures for themselves and their communities. At Oasis, girls learn to make healthy decisions, explore the world and themselves, and discover their full potential.
At Oasis For Girls, our work is intended to support the "whole girl." Methodologically, we strive to provide extended connections and multiple modes of activity designed to build on one another through repetition and the development of incremental and complementary skills and experiences, while fostering a sense of collective identity as "Oasis girls." This extended contact and sequential skills-building provides girls and young women with enduring opportunities to develop trusting relationships with positive, supportive adults, develop a sense of collective identity and partnership, and engage in an extended period of skills-development and practice.
Typically, the activities of our core sequence - the Springboard Series for Girls - operate on a one-year cycle, although girls may choose to extend or modify this course offering. Throughout the year, girls develop multiple positive pathways to future success:
A foundation of life skills, critical thinking, and emotional and interpersonal literacy; academic, basic technological, and transferable job readiness skills to support academic and professional development;
Expressive capacity through arts creation; education into cultural history and the power of movement building;
Peer support and cross-identity learning that cultivates positive solidarity with other females across age, culture, and divisive identities;
Exposure to broadened cultural horizons and networks of connections through arts, education, mentors, and adult allies.
Our Theory of Change & Primary Strategy: Oasis For Girls recognizes that girls and young women who face social, familial, cultural, and academic challenges need practical and psychological support from trusted and consistent adult allies, delivered within a peer-based culture of care and reciprocal support.
We believe that low-income girls and girls of color can achieve autonomy and satisfaction in their personal, academic, and professional lives when engaged in extended, multi-modal, culturally relevant and developmentally appropriate activities in a supportive environment.
Therefore, our primary strategy is to provide girls with broad and ongoing exposure to multiple vocational, cultural, and academic opportunities coupled with training in personal and interpersonal skills, delivered in a safe, culturally relevant space that emphasizes autonomy, relationship-building, and positive decision-making.
The staff-to-participant ratio allows the development of trusting personal connections between staff and participants, while the limited number of participants allows the development of strong peer relationships and a common culture.
We operate year-round during out-of-school times (after school, school breaks, and summer vacation), coordinating with the calendar of the San Francisco Unified School District. Our budget for 2012 is $388,270.31.
Who We Serve: Oasis focuses on low-income high-school-aged immigrant girls and girls of color, generally ages 14-17, from throughout San Francisco. In general, Oasis strives to serve two categories of girls: Those who are "on the edge" of risk and those who are "off the radar" - unnoticed, not obviously troublesome, but disengaged and under-supported.
In screening applicants, Oasis strives to identify girls and young women who are ready to benefit from the opportunities and services that core to Oasis's work. In rare cases, candidates with greater needs, more complex behaviors, or developmental delays are referred to other organizations that are better suited to meet their needs.
In order to foster peer learning and cultivate participants' abilities to positively interact with multiple "types" of girls, Oasis intentionally cultivates a mix of four sub-populations:
1. Girls who are striving, relatively high achievers who carry excessive sense of burden;
2. Girls who may be considered socially awkward, disconnected, or loners;
3. Girls who tend to be quiet and compliant but who are not engaged in positive programs that extend their
capacities;
4. Girls who may be dabbling in difficulty to some degree but might readily respond to positive environments.
