As a national organization, Girls Incorporated has been making a difference in the lives of girls since 1864. Girls Inc. of Greater Indianapolis has been active since 1969.
Our mission is to inspire all girls to be strong, smart, and boldSM. Our vision is of empowered girls and an equitable society.
Before we delivered programs via outreach, we operated clubs.
Locally, three mothers from the Fountain Square neighborhood founded our affiliate chapter in 1969, seeking an alternative gathering place to the nearby pool hall for their daughters. For many years, we operated club facilities, providing after school and summer programming to girls in two Indianapolis neighborhoods. In any given year, we served between 500-600 girls collectively between the two clubs.
In the mid 1990s, our Board and staff decided to make a larger impact on the thousands of girls living in Central Indiana. For the next eight years, we continued to operate both clubs while also cultivating outreach partnerships with local schools to bring our programs to the girls. In time, we found that the number of girls attending our Mid North club was dwindling due to transportation difficulties.
By 2003, outreach programming had proven to be successful and we made the decision to close our Mid North club. This decision allowed us to shift staffing and resources to take more programs out to the girls, rather than expecting them to come to us.
In 2006, we saw a similar trend in enrollment at our Fountain Square club and in a bold move, our board and staff decided we would sell our final facility and transition to a completely outreach model.
We inspire girls to be strong, smart, and bold through collaborations with local organizations.
We now operate exclusively via collaborations, working not only with schools, but also community centers, libraries, churches, youth organizations; essentially any organization that already serves groups of girls.
This model works because of four items:
Partners agree to provide us with free space to deliver our programs and to recruit the girls to participate;
Girls Inc. agrees to provide the curriculum and the trained personnel to deliver the programs;
volunteers pair up to deliver the curriculum; and
private, password-protected web portals allow us to leverage communication and coordination between a small staff and a large pool of volunteers and partners!
In 2008, we were able to deliver Girls Inc. programming to over 1,100 girls. As of September 2009, we have served over 2,100 girls with our strong, smart, and bold programs, and we have over 50 multi-session programs scheduled for this fall! Stay tuned; we are just getting started!
Watch a video
Alumnae and current participants share what makes them strong, smart, and bold.
How are volunteers involved with Girls Inc? This video, produced by WYFYI for the Indiana Achievement Awards, profiles a volunteer working with girls at Fall Creek Valley Elementary School and the Butler University Speakers Lab.
What does a collaboration look like? Marcus Robinson of the Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School explains, in a video produced by WISH for the NUVO Cultural Vision Awards.
In addition to outreach programs throughout the year at partner locations, Girls Inc. runs summer camps! Watch a video about one of our camps, held at Marian University in conjunction with the Life Science Education Center.
Looking for a different Girls Inc. location in Indiana?
Girls Incorporated of Bloomington Website Girls Incorporated of Franklin/Johnson County Website Girls Incorporated of Jackson County Website Girls Incorporated of Jefferson County Website Girls Incorporated of Richmond Website Girls Incorporated of Shelbyville/Shelby County Website
