Building Imagined Communities: AFG’s 2024-2029 Strategic Plan
We are excited to share Alliance for Girls’* (AFG) new strategic plan, which charts the course of our collective future to facilitate generative change with and for girls and gender-expansive youth and the organizations that serve them.
By implementing this strategic plan, AFG aims to create an imagined community** where girls and gender-expansive youth, especially those of color, are valued, respected, and safe, through youth-led research, storytelling, and collective advocacy.
In the coming years, we’ll focus on four core strategies:
YOUTH RESEARCH HUB
Expanding and strengthening AFG's research capacity is at the heart of AFG’s next chapter. Nonprofits, funders, leaders, policymakers, and communities rely on data to better serve girls and gender-expansive youth. Together, with youth as the expert researchers, we’ll continue to reimagine research to facilitate, validate, and elevate girls and gender-expansive youth of color’s experiences and stories as truth. To help move this work forward, we are thrilled to welcome Evaluation Studio’s research team, -Irina Núñez, Reina Rodríguez, Cimone Satele, and Shwetha Sridharan- who are now integrated and part of AFG.
COMMUNITY BUILDING
We center relationship-building, connection, and care throughout AFG practices, engaging our members through our network, ongoing learning opportunities, speaking engagements, events, as well as in our research and power-building work. AFG can provide dedicated support to organizations and institutions in refining their data and knowledge creation process to center youth and uplift their own stories of impact.
DATA-DRIVEN SYSTEMS CHANGE
We build power with communities to catalyze data-driven systems change advocacy by centering the lived experiences and policy recommendations made by girls and gender-expansive youth of color and the organizations that serve them. AFG will facilitate collective advocacy and create spaces for girls and gender-expansive youth of color to directly engage with government agencies and officials, institutional leaders, funders, and other key decision-makers to promote the policies, budgets, and programs that girls and gender-expansive youth of color themselves want to see.
WALKING THE TALK
We are investing in and supporting AFG‘s internal culture through improved processes, structures, and development that align with our values and organizational integrity.
This year, we're committed to building stronger relationships with our local communities. We want to focus on understanding and bringing together who and what is involved when it comes to supporting girls and gender-expansive youth of color at the local level. Our goal is to ensure girls and gender-expansive youth of color are positioned as solution builders and lean into their expertise on what they need. While we have many projects already underway, the projects below will anchor our work for the next year:
AFG LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS STUDY
We know a lot has changed in the past 4 years. AFG will conduct a Bay Area Landscape Analysis to connect with girls and gender-expansive youth of color, the organizations and the broader community that serve them to learn more about the current state of the girl-serving sector at the local level and how we can collectively create a shared vision of working together. Check out our recent LA Community Asset Mapping report & heat map here!
AFG’S YOUTH RESEARCH HUB
AFG is designing and launching a Youth Research Hub as an opportunity to learn and more easily implement research practices led and informed by girl and gender-expansive youth of color. It is also a place where data and research by and for girls and gender-expansive youth of color can be shared. AFG believes this hub will foster a greater community of youth researchers.
LOCAL ADVOCACY AND POWER-BUILDING
AFG is conducting collaborative and inclusive systems change advocacy based on the recommendations that girls and gender-expansive youth of color themselves create out of our research.
We look forward to this next wave of AFG’s evolution under Chantal and Linda’s leadership. At every step they are rooted in the following values:
Joy in what we do
Creativity in the work
Freedom and care to show up as our whole and dignified selves
Trust as the foundation of relationships
Safety & support
Mutual consideration of labor
Developing our strategic plan was truly a collaborative process. We conducted focus groups and interviews with AFG member organizations, Board members, staff, girls, systems change collaborators, donors, and funders to better understand their experiences with AFG’s programming and where they think AFG should focus in the next 5 years.
Huge thank you to the AFG staff, board members, organizational members, youth, and champions, who generously contributed their time and knowledge to our inclusive strategic planning process.
We will continue to share what we learn along the way. Please follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and X to connect with our work.
Join us in creating a world where every girl or gender-expansive youth of color is valued, honored, safe, and cared for.
* “Girls” refers to gender-expansive youth (cis girls, trans girls, non-binary youth, gender non-conforming youth, gender queer youth and any girl-identified youth).
** "Imagined Communities" is an influential concept drawn from Chandra Mohanty's scholarship. It challenges dominant and oppressive universal truths that often erase or distort marginalized communities. An Imagined Community is one that starts by collectively gathering knowledge and sharing it for the benefit of all. It aligns and brings together coalitions and solidarities among women* of diverse communities and identities, transcending borders and conceptualizing power as fluid and evolving.
