Announcing the Bright Promise Awards from The Estée Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation!

Posted 25 July 2018 in EMpower News, Grantee Partner News   |   Share

EMpower is excited to announce a new awards initiative, the Bright Promise Awards from The Estée Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation! These awards are special in their emphasis on innovative thinking, and they are unique in their focus on the needs of younger adolescent girls ages 10 to 13, an often overlooked group who are at a pivotal time in their development.

The competitive awards initiative, funded by The Estée Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation, incentivizes grassroots organizations to develop creative solutions and innovative program approaches that will keep younger adolescent girls safe, healthy and learning.

While there has been substantial progress globally on primary school enrollment and gender parity in education, persistent educational gaps remain, especially for those girls living in poverty. To offer the promise of a bright future, girls’ education programming must go beyond ensuring girls have access to school. It also must help keep girls in school, ensuring that girls learn, feel safe and complete their secondary education. Around puberty, continuing in school becomes a challenge for many girls who are marginalized and living in certain cultural and community contexts. The Bright Promise Awards are designed to address the specific challenges that younger adolescent girls face in receiving and completing a quality education within their local contexts.

To kick-off this awards initiative in February 2018, EMpower invited grantee partners who work with adolescent girls and meet certain criteria, to submit an application with their proposed innovative program design, offering solutions that will address the obstacles that marginalized younger adolescent girls face. A critical component of the solution design is that the girls themselves need to play a central role in identifying the obstacles and developing the program.

After an EMpower-driven internal evaluation process, eight winning grantee partners were chosen and will receive funding to implement their solutions. The organizations chosen as winners of a Bright Promise Award from The Estée Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation are: SiKanda (Mexico), United through Sport (South Africa), Swechha (India), Saath (India), YKB (Indonesia), Red Nose Foundation (Indonesia) GENDES, A.C. (Mexico) and the YP Foundation (India).

The program innovations range from using community theater to advocate for girls’ education in India, to intergenerational clubs pairing young women with older women mentors in Mexico. Congratulations to all winning organizations!

Thank you to The Estée Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation for supporting innovations that will give younger adolescent girls the promise of a bright future.