Rites for Girls launches five new programmes in Sussex to support girls’ mental wellbeing

Rites for Girls made the announcement as Children’s Mental Health Week (February 5-11) begins. Visit www.ritesforgirls.com.

The organisation said its next Girls Journeying Together programmes will launch in March and April this year and will offer fully funded places to ‘harder to reach’ girls with groups running in Bognor Regis, Forest Row, Horsham and Lewes, alongside other national locations.

Founder-director Kim McCabe, author of ‘From Daughter to Woman: Parenting girls safely through their teens’, said there has been a ‘dramatic rise’ in mental health issues among girls at ‘increasingly young ages’ since the start of the Covid pandemic. She said: “Yet there is a concerning lack of effective government support and school resources available in Britain to support these young people.”

Kim said: “The need for solutions to this crisis has never been more urgent. Thanks to funding from the National Lottery Community Fund awarded in recognition of the effectiveness of our work generating high levels of mental wellbeing for girls in communities across the country, we are now able to offer fully-funded bursary places on our flagship Girls Journeying Together programmes to girls with otherwise limited access.”

For more information about upcoming Girls Journeying Together groups and Taster days, and to apply for fully-funded bursary places, visit www.ritesforgirls.com/girls-journeying-together.

Rites for Girls works to alleviate suffering and distress that pre-teen and teenage girls may experience. They can now offer hundreds of fully-funded bursary places over the next three years.

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Rites for Girls said Girls Journeying Together groups focus on enhancing the mental wellbeing of girls preventatively and offer a year of in-person monthly support for pre-teen girls, aged 10-12 (and their mothers via mothers’ circles). They support girls’ transition from primary to secondary school. A spokesperson said: “They practice being true to themselves, learn about puberty, share their hopes and fears, and help each other into their teens.”

Since its inception in 2011, Rites for Girls has welcomed more than 1,000 girls aged eight to 18 years old to its programmes and feedback from the girls is overwhelmingly positive. Rites for Girls now trains and supports women to run its licensed Girls Journeying Together (in-person) and Girls’ Net (on-line) programmes.

Kim McCabe said: “As our programmes expand exponentially, we are calling for more women to train as facilitators to support our budding movement for social change. Beginning in June 2024, our next two-year Facilitator Training is an extraordinary opportunity to bring meaning and purpose into your life as you learn to support girls to journey safely through adolescence and emerge as strong, capable young women, equipped to remain true to themselves and to express themselves freely in the face of the many pressures confronting them from peers, social media, cyber bullying, and society at large.”

To find out more and to sign up for the a webinar on February 19 visit www.ritesforgirls.com/facilitator-training.

Sophie Beaupain, who has been offering groups in Wimbleodon since 2019, said: “The training highlighted how much this work is needed – it;s something to do if you really want to make a difference to the lives of girls and their mothers in your local community.”