The Empowering Young Women program continues to flourish, impacting the lives of young women.
Empowering Young Women is a group mentoring program for teenage girls and women from the community who meet regularly to share experiences, challenges and successes.
The program gives a space for girls to ask questions and learn from experienced and reliable role models who have varying life experiences, backgrounds, culture, and aims to challenge assumptions and broaden perspectives to empower women to walk in confidence within themselves.
As the years have shifted, teenage girls are faced with more challenges then before. Social media today exposes teenage girls to dangerous messages that push them to unrealistic standards of how life should be. Navigating appearance, work and study options, life choices, anxiety, depression, future thinking is challenging for year 9 girls who, more than ever, have so many choices, distractions, goals, and options to choose from in their life. Often teenagers don’t know how, when, if they should be asking questions about these topics.
Group mentoring creates a sense of connectedness and confidence within an environment of mutual support, learning and growth. The biggest takeaway is the unity that comes out of the group, as women realise they do not have to do life alone, everyone goes through similar struggles and successes, and the group is here to experience that together.
The program is run at the Panthers on the Prowl offices in Penrith. The team picks the students up from the school on the prowl bus and drops them back after the session has finished. The program runs on the high school’s early finish day, so students are participating in the project during out of school hours.
