Community Partners
To supplement our holistic curriculum, Girls First works with many community partners, including:
Live. Eat. Be Healthy. LLC.
Girls First partners with Chef Rashida Pagett, owner of Live. Eat. Be Healthy. LLC and a Youth Community Nutrition Educator at The Food Trust, an organization that works to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, nutritious food and information to make healthy decisions.
Chef Rashida and our staff work weekly with our students to discuss their various food preferences to create menus more tailored to their palates and bring them new culinary experiences as well. Additionally, Chef Rashida works to teach our girls about nutrition and provide context for the various parts of a well-balanced diet.
Rotation Records is a Norristown company dedicated to providing the best music creation services to artists, companies and to the community. Girls First students work with engineers and producers at Rotation Records to write, perform and record their own music, and often find their voices along the way. Among other things, this partnership allows students to gain experience with professional artists, provides an exciting intersection with science and technology, and encourages our girls to proudly share their own voices while simultaneously amplifying and lifting others up.
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Theatre Horizon is a professional Norristown theatre company that uses the transformative power of storytelling to foster empathy and to create an inclusive home for artists, audiences, and students alike. Teaching artists from Theatre Horizon work with Girls First students on special theatre and poetry projects that are designed to help them tell their own stories.
Drexel University College of Medicine
Drexel Med students work with our students on weekly STEAM activities, focusing on science, engineering and/or math. They also introduce the girls to a famous female scientist (often a woman of color) tied to that day’s activity.
Montgomery County Community College
Girls First’s summer camp is held annually at Montgomery County Community College (MCCC), with whom we partner each year. Our camp is a cross-cultural arts-based curriculum that “travels” throughout various global cultures and is designed to expose children ages 6-10 to global cultures, history, artistic techniques, dance, and music, and to build teamwork with group challenges and physical activities.
Partnering with MCCC each year is what sets our summer program apart from others in the area. Holding the camp on a college campus allows our students access to professional grade equipment that they would not have access to within the Norristown community. Additionally, it enables students to become comfortable moving from building to building on a college campus, further inspiring them to pursue secondary education. Participants meet new friends, form new connections with community members recruited through the college, and see themselves in new ways — archeologist, innovator, creator, collaborator, college campus kid.