Our Speaker on17 October was Kendal Collins from Sisters United. Kendal was assisted in her presentation by Saumalu Kali, program facilitator at Sisters United.
Kendal is and has been a social worker within schools and the community. Saumalu has worked in the health and youth work space for some 20 years.
Sisters United is a family based organisation providing exciting, fresh and creative services to young women in Auckland between the ages of 12 -18.
The sisters in the name of the organisation are the Goebel sisters, Parris (a well known dance choreographer), Kendall and Narelle. They have experience in social work, creative arts and design which are applied to helping young women who have to face bullying, low self esteem, body image and such like.
The aim of the Sisters United programs is to engage with these young women using culturaly responsive programs with creative delivery with the intention of giving the young women confidence to face and address the issues mentioned above.
Sisters United offers 8 workshops that aim to help young women build a foundation of understanding about who they are by discovering their identity, build self-worth and esteem.
The workshops involve dance, the spoken word, art, music photography fashion and dream boards. These workshops are delivered to community groups, schools and individually.
Sisters United is running programs in 6 schools at the moment and there are a further 3 waiting to join in.
Because of the nature of their activities it is very difficult to measure success and KPI’s are very difficult to identify. The way the programs are evaluated now is through post event evaluations to see how the particpants felt
Sisters United has very limited funding so they run ongoing fundraisers to undertake their programs and keep operating. This means hard work both presenting the programs being run and finding funding to keep things going.
For more about Sisters United see their website www.sistersunited.co.nz