By Daily Press staff
City Hall is building up the community’s young girls to be self sufficient and resourceful.
A group of 6th, 7th and 8th grade girls will don hard hats, wield hammers and blowtorches, and learn the basics of what it takes to keep the city running in Rosie’s Girls Santa Monica, an award-winning summer camp program offered by the city of Santa Monica. Rosie’s Girls is a trades exploration camp for 11-to 13-year-old girls designed to build self-esteem, physical confidence, interpersonal cooperation and leadership skills through learning and applying basic skills in carpentry, and other trades and through a range of physical challenges.
Participants practice their skills in shop-based activities and in “real world” public service work, enabling them to trim trees in local parks, rappel down the three-story fire department training tower and fill pot holes in city streets. In addition, girls have the opportunity to work on community service projects for local social service agencies. In the past, the girls have constructed formal building signage for a youth center, chess boards and coat racks for a local senior center and chairs for a Santa Monica pre-school.
The program also includes a variety of other activities to encourage the girls’ self-expression including dance, drumming, mask-making and stand-up comedy. This year the program was the recipient of a $2,600 grant from the Norton Family Foundation. The grant is being used to develop curriculum and implement a module that will allow girls to curate an exhibition of their own creations at Bergamot Station, a Santa Monica based arts complex.
During the first session of Rosie’s Girls, held in Santa Monica from July 11 to 29, the girls produced whimsical working clocks. The functional art was debuted at Bergamot Station on July 29, at the camp’s culminating event.
The Women’s Foundation of California Los Angeles Donors Circle recently selected Rosie’s Girls as one of its $10,000 grant recipients for 2005. The grant provides scholarship funding for girls who would otherwise not be able to afford the Rosie’s Girls program.
Rosie’s Girls Santa Monica is open to girls entering the sixth, seventh and eighth grades and is held at the city maintenance yards, 2500 Michigan Ave. The next Rosie’s Girls Santa Monica session runs Aug. 8-26. Financial assistance is available to qualifying families. For more information about Rosie’s Girls or to receive an application, call (310) 458-8540.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 6, 2005. Read the original PDF.