I recently joined the Global Shapers Kathmandu Hub as a fellow and am ecstatic to have met all the wonderful current Shapers who have immediately made me feel at home. After being a part of this community for the past 3 months, I understood why everyone referred to the hub as the “Global Shapers Family.”
My initial motivation to join the hub was to contribute to their exciting projects that aim to empower, uplift and equip the local communities. That is why I am glad I received an opportunity to create an impact through the project-Beyond Gender Lines.
Beyond Gender Lines is a project created to empower young girls in decision-making, uplift their confidence and positively contribute to their self-esteem. My team members guided me through the process of ideation to execution.
Here, we researched, planned and met with officials to identify and select schools across and outside the Kathmandu Valley where we could teach the curriculum. Our curriculum and education materials were designed and created in an effort to educate the students, primarily the girls, to recognize their own voices as a force of change. This can even be in a micro-scale, during their daily lives, where they shift their perspectives to deconstruct the societal norms that are built up for girls, from as early on in their lives as possible. So, a theme was curated for each week, with activities that followed helping convey the theme to the students. We did our own research, with many iterations and discussions with the facilitators to perfect the curriculum so the objectives are well met.
Whilst I was excited to be a part of this, it was beyond my imagination how powerful the impact this course designed by the Beyond Gender Lines team was. During our first session at Kanyamandir School, the kids were shy at first but slowly they began to interact and open up regarding their experiences, which was really an eye opener. As I looked at this through a male lens, it put so many things in even greater perspective for me about our society. For instance, speaking about the patriarchy, or the “Good girl vs Happy girl” dilemma, where I saw the kids describe the “Happy girl” with so much euphoric energy, which was a stark contrast to them describing what is deemed as a “Good Girl.” That difference in atmosphere between the two conditions, made me realize the true impact of this course, and the way it is helping break mental barriers in these kids that have been constructed throughout their childhood.
Even though this was just the first session out of the three, you could see how the kids became more confident during the session, speaking up, interacting with one another, interacting with the facilitators and spreading positivity amongst one another. This only excites me to go ahead and be a part of the following two sessions at KanyaMandir School and hopefully with time, many more schools across Nepal.
I joined the community with hopes of creating an impact in society and as I reflect on my time I am happy to say that I achieved more than this as I made friends, helped communities address hidden issues, learned about societal challenges from gender lens and overall learned the true value of being a Shaper.
