A thoughtful dinner was cooked by the mentees for the mentors to complete our journey. We gathered for our thank yous and enjoyed a beautiful evening on the beach.
Kleco Kleco to everyone for contributing their time to this pilot project.
Latest
The Slumber Party
On Saturday May 7th we gathered for a relaxed slumber party.
Girlz Gym Night
On Monday May 2, we held a girls gym night where we practiced our volleyball skills and had a pretty rivoting game of stealing sticks but we definitely didn’t take anything too seriously!
The Mentor & Mentee Mixer
On Monday April 4th, the mentors cooked up a beautiful welcoming dinner for the mentees. We started with a talking circle so each of us could introduce ourselves.
We invited local elder Barb Touchie to welcome us to the territory and bless our meal. This was followed by a spirited ‘appreciation song’. With team spaghetti, team taco and team salad in full effect the food was delicious and plentiful.
We then played a wide range of ice-breaker games such as duck-duck-goose, shadow ninjas, telephone and name games.
We finished off with a friendly version of speed-dating so everyone would get a chance to talk a little bit with everyone else. Everyone’s secret top 3 choices for mentor or mentees were collected at the end of the night.
The Mentors Training Day
At the beginning of April we started up again with 9 young women who were committed to mentoring younger girls in grades 7&8.
Throughout the day the mentors-to-be reflected on their own high school experiences, they considered what it means to be a ‘mentor’, they brainstormed the kinds of support they thought would be impactful and made plans for the mixer with the mentees the next day.
Some of the mentors personal goals for the project:
“I want to be a person that my mentee can come talk to, I want to build trust”
“I want to improve my communication skills. High school was difficult, maybe I would have done thing differently with a little help”
“I have experiences to share, I have regrets and I think I would have liked to have someone when I was younger”
“I want to learn more about myself”
” I want to open doors for myself, gain experience and know that I did a good job”
But most of all, we had a lot of fun getting to know each other!
The Girls Workshop Retreat
At the beginning of November we started off the Pass It On girl’s mentorship program in Ucluelet/Tofino with a weekend sleepover, workshop retreat. 10 to 13 girls attended each day, some of which would go on to become mentors.
Christina Antonik came from our mama program, Saltspring Women Opposed to Violence and Abuse (SWOVA), to help us facilitate four-core workshops that would set the groundwork for the rest of the program: Depression/Expression, Body Image, Partying Safety, and Girl/Girl Relationships. We utilized a variety of exercises and activities designed to focus the young ladies on sharing their experiences and knowledge with each other. We lit candles to honour our individual strengths, we dared to look in the mirror at our inner reflections and we held a world cafe to discuss the dangers we see at parties.
We shared incredible pizzas treated to us by the Common Loaf Bake Shop and held lengthy sessions of pajama court at night.
On the last day we started out with a sage cleansing to prepare us for our last workshop on girl/girl relationships. This took us to a much deeper place during the activities, especially during a rock activity where we shared memories of times when we had been unkind to our peers. We placed these memories in rocks that i took down the water after wards to be washed away by the ocean. We then placed our promises to treat the women in our lives with greater respect in the stones we took home with us.
passitonwestcoast 