We have the power to use our voices and dollars to see that every girl has a chance to develop her voice and talents and contribute to our collective human capital. Give her the opportunity, and she will change the world.
"For the Good's local Kenyan team has developed a way of communicating that speaks to the hearts and rationale of their fellow citizens, emboldening them to decide to support women and girls in their work and education. The opportunity to watch this transformation take place in person left an unforgettable impression, powerfully reinforcing my belief that For the Good is truly making a difference in the lives of many young girls and their communities in which they live."
-Shelly Sheppick, For the Good donor since 2016, traveled to Kenya with For the Good to see their programs in action when she became a board member in 2017.
We work with communities to keep girls in school so they are equipped and emboldened to drive their own lives.
When For the Good was founded in 2014, we focused on addressing one immediate barrier to girl's education in rural Kenya: lack of access to sanitary pads. We partnered with schools and communities in Kenya to supply girls with critical reproductive health education and reusable sanitary pads.
While distributing pads and health information to girls, we also listened, a lot. We listened to girls, mothers, fathers, teachers, and community leaders describe the barriers to adolescent girls. It became clear over time that access to sanitary pads was only one, though very real, barrier to girl's educations. Many other more foundational barriers were present in community after community in high need regions of Kenya: Child marriage, early pregnancy, FGC (female genital cutting), poverty, and gendered attitudes that led to parents prioritize their boys when and if they had money to pay for school fees, along with under investment in girl's educations overall. While some of these barriers are less visible and tangible than lack of a sanitary pad, they are equally crippling to girl's opportunities. In response, we re-engineered our approach and programs to focus on these foundational barriers first before introducing our reusable pads and education,
Today, we use a multi-faceted approach to enroll and retain girls in school. We target remote, rural communities in southern Kenya where girl's school enrollment is especially low and then work with those communities to address the biggest barriers to education locally. We partner with them to build affordable day secondary schools where none exist; support these new schools with low-cost, high impact tools to improve learning outcomes; and also rely on a team of young, local Maasai interns to cultivate new ideas about education in parents and then help them enroll their children into school. Finally, because girls are embedded within their communities and assume the roles, dreams and constraints of that community, we work to sensitize community leaders to the value of educating their daughters and strive to help them turn this change of knowledge into action.
Organization name
For the Good
other names
FTG, For the Good, Period
2015
Tax id (EIN)
47-1979734
Category
Education
Organization Size
Medium Organization
Address
For the Good 1002 Cooper Ave., Suite 100Mailing
For the Good 1002 Cooper Ave., Suite 100Garfield County, CO, US
KE