Girls’ Leadership
Justice for Girls (JFG) offers internships to teenage girls. These opportunities empower them to develop valuable skills and make a meaningful impact in advocacy and social justice.
“I didn’t understand what consent meant until working with JFG. I didn’t have any sense of entitlement to my own body. I didn’t have any autonomy. Being able to educate teenage girls and boys on all the things I wish I would have had the opportunity to learn really felt amazing.”
– Justice for Girls Intern
Gain Experience, Earn Credits, and Make a Difference with a JFG Internship
Over the past two decades, JFG interns have played a vital role in the development, vision, priorities and advocacy of Justice for Girls. Our interns have gone on to become leaders at JFG and in the larger community (local, national and international).
Through JFG internships, girls and young women are able to earn grade 12 credits and learn about social policy analysis, criminal justice monitoring, media analysis, public education and community development. Please contact us to find out more.
Internship Testimonials
Some of our previous interns from our Girls’ Leadership program have provided us with anonymous internship impact statements describing the internship and the effect it had on them and their lives. We are very grateful to them for sharing their feedback
I remember the day I found out about the Justice for Girls Internship opportunity. I didn’t think I’d have a shot at being hired, but I was so excited about the organization and the possibility of becoming a part of it that I tried anyway. To my surprise, I landed a spot on the Girls’ Advocacy & Education Center project team. It was the first job I had had in over four years, and it meant the world to me. As I began to become more involved in the Internship, I started to grow as a person. I felt my voice being heard and my words moving people.
When I was abused and entered the court system as a young teenager, I was alone. I was alone in my addictions and in all of the abuse that followed. It’s easy to feel like you have no worth when you’re a young girl who is being poked and prodded, stuffed full of unnecessary medications, and passed along from psychiatrist to psychiatrist. Becoming a part of Justice For Girls made me realize I could have been saved from so much damage if only there had been enough support, enough resources and enough people who believe that my voice matters.
This is what I love about Justice For Girls: their social justice perspective, their ability to trust and support young women who are feeling the most hopeless. Over the past few months, I have been educated on my rights, the rights of the young women around me, and what can be done to help us work through all of the systems that dangle us by strings like puppets. The organization has helped me learn that the best way to help youth is to listen to the words they say.
I’m proud of being an intern with Justice for Girls. I’m proud of myself for turning my life around and I want other young women and girls to feel this pride too.
I was one of the three young women hired for the 5-month internship at Justice for Girls in January 2018. Having the opportunity to use my experience as a girl living in poverty in Vancouver to protect and promote girls’ rights to equality and safety, as well as earning a full-time wage with all barriers out of my way was truly a life changing experience.
Growing up money was always tight. My parents would often have multiple jobs to make ends meet. I wore donated and second-hand clothes. In school, I had a hard time getting forms signed or money for field trips and school fees. I’d get the photocopied work book in a used binder so mine was different from most of my classmates and most days I heavily relied on school lunches.
In high school, I continued to have to deal with those same things but becoming a teenage girl came with its complete own set of problems. Now I didn’t get hot lunch, I still couldn’t pay absolutely necessary school fees and people made fun of my old clothes and used to laugh and say I smelled like Value Village. Boys verbally and physically harassed me in class and in the halls. I became further and further disconnected from school and eventually almost all of the teachers gave up on me and I just didn’t ever go back. A year later, after couch-surfing and staying in other very precarious places, I started to realize the severity of my substance abuse. I managed to go back to school and redid the 10th grade at an Alternative Education Program in East Vancouver.
After a year or so of being back in school and in recovery for 5 or 6 months, my youth & family worker approached me about the part time internship in April 2016. Being introduced to Justice for Girls then was so crucial for me at a time when I was trying get on my feet and was very vulnerable. Even just having the support of girls my age and women who had been through same struggles at my age as mentors made all the difference.
The impact of even the first part-time internship was so great in my life that I really wanted to stay connected to the organization as much as possible. For the first time, I felt like my voice was heard. So, when I found out about the January 2018 internship I was thrilled. In the early weeks, we did a lot of training on many subjects including women and girl’s equality rights, social justice issues, sexism, poverty, violence, racism, colonialism and other forms of discrimination that impacts the lives of girls’. As well as learning about laws and legislation on human rights and the Canadian legal system.
The first week of the internship we all agreed to speak at a forum held by Battered Women’s Support Services in response to the murders of two little girls, Chloe, 6 years old and Aubrey who was only 4. We were the last group to speak at the end of a 4-hour forum in front of 80 people. Nerves were high, but as I looked into the crowd people were really listening, nodding their heads, and a few were even crying. The amount of people that came up to us after, spoke with us, and shook our hands and said “keep doing what you’re doing” really inspired me to want to keep doing this work. I felt confident and felt like I was right where I was supposed to be. I felt valuable and strong as a young woman for one of the first times.
One of the many things we did over the 5 months, included creating and bringing to life workshops for high school students about consent and their rights. Our workshops are so unique because they were created by youth for youth. I didn’t understand what consent meant until working with JFG. I didn’t have any sense of entitlement to my own body. I didn’t have any autonomy. Being able to educate teenage girls and boys on all the things I wish I would have had the opportunity to learn really felt amazing. Going into Alternative schools and talking to high school students, many who are impacted by poverty, colonialism, the criminal justice system and more, was really important and exciting to us interns, especially after all of our hard work. The first presentation was coincidentally at the Alternative program that I graduated from. I was nervous to present to my peers. But the nervousness didn’t last and I remembered what I was there to do; educate them about their rights and answer any questions they have. Over the weeks, we did back to back workshops.
Being able to talk and connect with young women at all the different schools and seeing that this may be one of the first times they realize that they are not the only one having these experiences was so rewarding. This internship is so important, because it allows young women, who have the lived experience, to be in leadership positions. I couldn’t see myself finishing high school, let alone representing and co-leading the work in an organization. Girls need to see girls and young women working on issues that impact girls and young women, and that’s what makes JFG unique. Very few organizations have youth being the driving force of an organization for youth. Another unique trait about JFG is the commitment to removing many barriers in the way of the young women interns, so we can fully focus on the training and the work.
I can’t think of any other place I would get training and learn all the different subjects and skills we did in only 5 short months. This internship has given me so many new skills and knowledge that I will be able to use when I go to post-secondary, whenever I get a new job, and just in my everyday life and for that I will always be grateful. Not only did the internship set me up for better jobs and future opportunities, but also it has given many connections to my community. I am now accessing resources I never knew about before JFG and I can refer my friends or other young women to them. I know I will always have JFG beside me as I make the transition from a teenage girl into a woman, to help me climb or get those barriers out of my way, whatever they may be. I have mentors from JFG that I will have for a life time, as well as lifelong friendships with my fellow interns. I cannot imagine what my life would look like without JFG, and thankfully I don’t have to. I only wish that many other young women, with pasts similar to mine, can experience this amazing and truly life-changing opportunity.
In April of 2016, I was hired as a part-time intern for Justice for Girls. I was 17 and attending an Alternate School while raising my 1-year-old daughter. I was living in unstable and unsafe housing. My daughter and I were sharing a space with no less than six and sometimes more than eight people in a 3-bedroom house. I was in government care and on a Youth Agreement. I was struggling financially. Youth Agreements barely cover the basic necessities for one young woman, let alone a young, single mother and her child.
Poverty has been one of biggest barriers to my success in life. I find that the systems in place meant to help those who struggle financially create an endless cycle of poverty. It is incredibly challenging to be successful in life when you are forced to live in survival mode. I wanted to be thinking about my ambitions, goals and dreams, but often ended up having to think about things like how was I going to afford rent and children’s Tylenol.
When I first started interning with Justice for Girls in 2016, it was just once a week for three hours. It worked perfectly for me. I had a baby girl to take care of. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was enough to take a little of the weight off my shoulders. A couple hundred dollars a month meant that I could afford both Tylenol and rent. It meant I could buy my daughter clothes and I could buy a coffee. It also meant having a conversation between 4 women who listened and believed me when I told them something I had never told anyone. In that moment, I felt like I had value. That moment blossomed so that by the end of the part-time internship, I made real, meaningful, and lasting relationships with strong women. This circle of women continues to guide and support me today.
In September 2018, I was hired into JFG’s full-time internship program. During the 5-month program, we received further training on our rights and the law. We did workshops on advocacy, public speaking and writing. We had discussions about the realities for teenage girls, the barriers they face and how it impacts them. We spoke to countless professionals working with young people to offer our perspectives on how to support girls who experience poverty, violence or are in government care. We went into classrooms and facilitated workshops with youth on their rights and the law about sexual assault and consent. It was so valuable to have open and real conversations with other girls. We also worked with education and healthcare professionals in roundtable dialogues to talk about how together, we could improve the responses to sexualized violence in teenage girls’ lives. The full-time internship wage stabilized me as I went through one of the scariest times of my life. I became close friends with another intern and my writing and public speaking skills improved.
Fast forward to now. In February 2019, I was hired as the Young Women’s Leadership and Engagement Coordinator and this year alone, as an intern and a new staff member, I have spoken to over 900 people, every time bringing forward the voices of hundreds of young women I have listened to. My daughter is now four-years-old and we live in stable housing. I feel safe now. I feel grounded in who I am as a young woman, I feel empowered with knowledge and respect for myself.
Within the past three years, I have witnessed every young woman who has been a part of JFG talk about how meaningful and important it is for them to be connected to women. I have witnessed and experienced sudden difficult realizations that the world wasn’t what we thought it was and what was happening to us wasn’t okay. Over time, there were also realizations of our strength, resilience, importance and impact. We became empowered and we do the best we can to try to change the burdening realities for other young women and girls. The smallest of things create the biggest impact.
My time with Justice for Girls has been very impactful for me, in a number of ways. While I was an intern, I learned about issues I hadn’t known that women and girls deal with prior to working with Justice for Girls. My views on a variety of topics have been refined, which is what I desired to gain from this entire experience in the first place. Additionally, I feel as if I have taken enough information, from the discussions I shared with my coworkers and peers in the girls group I helped facilitate, to educate the people in my life. This had been another goal I had, upon becoming a part of the organization.
Completion of these goals have sparked great elation within me, this being because I was never known to even set goals. I was never motivated to set any for myself because of this. This position has really expanded what I feel I could do in my future, there is now a wider variety of paths that I can go down; there are things that I hadn’t considered taking up in post-secondary. Writing this out helps me see that I have become a lot more open-minded. Which leads me onto the realization that I always had these options, I truly can go do whatever I’d really like to. The problem was that I never put solid thought into my own future. I really didn’t care much for it, before.
This new passion for advocacy has helped me blossom into a better version of myself, which I fail to give myself credit for. It reminded me of everything good about me. I care for myself a lot more now, and I’ve even been in the process of beginning to love myself, along with reclaiming my interests! A little bit before I had even joined my alternate education program, I lost my drive for writing. For me to finally develop a love for it again, makes me very happy. It’s almost like I’ve picked up on advocating for myself, along the way.
I’ve benefited strongly from being in an environment where I’ve actually felt listened to. I actually felt respected and as if what I have talked about was valued. I feel like I have discovered a part of me that was always there, I never thought that I ever had the potential that I currently do. I’m actually sad that it’s over. I never took any moment for granted, I always enjoyed being at the office and never considered any of it work, but instead, a new day for learning. Before I started working, I rarely saw that piece of myself. It was rare to see me so eager and driven towards anything. I genuinely feel like someone new, and I’m so happy to express that this employment experience had such a wonderful influence on me.
I decided to enter this internship because I myself have lived in poverty my whole life. Growing up with a single mother and two other sisters, money was always our main concern. Throughout my seventeen years I have already faced multiple barriers that I have had to battle all on my own, so I wanted to be able to help and support other women and girls going through similar situations because I know how hard it is simply be a girl in this world. This internship has truly changed my life and opened my eyes to a whole new outlook on life. Justice For Girls has provided me with a wealth of knowledge and more importantly a safe place where I am surrounded by amazing women – a place where I no longer feel alone. I now feel empowered and ready to take on the world, which is a feeling I have never had the chance to feel.
We accomplished so much in the time in my time at Justice for Girls. One of the many things we have done which I personally enjoyed the most is the workshops we have created and presented to high schools throughout Vancouver. Our workshops focused on consent, sexism, rights, advocacy and resistance. Developing and presenting these workshops was also very beneficial for me because I learned so much about what I am entitled to as a girl. I didn’t know or fully understand the extent of my rights until joining JFG. Being able to bring these super important topics to light and to help educate alternative high school students who are heavily impacted by many of these issues is not only extremely necessary, but is also extremely fulfilling.
Throughout this internship we got the opportunity to visit, experience and participate in a variety of exciting and educational ventures. This included visiting an all-girls alternative school and a sexual assault center in Victoria as well as the BC parliament. We were also recently a part of an amazing local, grass-roots conference called Feminist Deliver, which took part alongside Women Deliver. This conference taught me so much valuable yet heart-wrenching information, both from my experience helping at the conference as well as my experience listening to the speakers. The conference gave me a deeper understanding of where the world is at right now and let me experience a strong work and leadership role.
There were so many different things that we did and accomplished in those short months and I am so beyond grateful and proud to have been a part of it all. This internship has not only helped me prepare and set me up for better jobs and future opportunities, but has also connected me to some amazing people, filled me with much needed, valuable knowledge, given me a voice and helped me graduate high school. I seriously do not know where I would be in life right now if it wasn’t for this internship but I can assure you it would not be somewhere I would want to be! I cannot fathom how lucky and entirely grateful I am for being able to experience such a life changing internship, and I hope that many other girls will get the chance to experience the same things I did. It is an opportunity of a lifetime!
My 4 weeks interning with JFG has been incredible, I’ve put in a lot of work and I’m extremely proud of myself. I feel accomplished and capable, those are 2 things I haven’t felt in a long time. I will admit I pushed myself pretty hard with this internship considering my personal life struggles but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I felt a drive and passion for my work and like I was doing something that actually mattered and was important. Zara did an amazing job as not only the supervisor but so much more, she really went above and beyond and I’m so thankful I got the chance to work with and be mentored by her.
I learned a lot this internship, I feel smart which is also another thing I haven’t felt in a very long time. This is all just how I feel from 4 short weeks, imagine what I could do with more. Interning is a highly meaningful source of education, especially with the types of girls JFG helps. I feel like my voice and opinion matters and is respected and that’s unfortunately something not a lot of girls ever feel. JFG creates a safe, welcoming and empowering environment so girls can find a sense of belonging and respect. Girls’ voices deserve to be amplified and put at the forefront of the conversation, we are the next generation and we are being shut down and muffled.
Girls not only want but NEED a safe women empowering environment where we can feel accepted and safe. Many girls violence and troubles are at the hands of males and we need a space detached from the patriarchy so girls can thrive. I have been failed by the system on many occasions and JFG helped me find my balance again and uplift me. As a girl my life has been designed for me to be an afterthought or completely passed over, girls need advocacy and resources.
I’m so thankful because this internship was remarkably educational, it’ll also help leverage me with my future goals. I need more girls to know about JFG and I personally think every girl in existence has experienced at least one thing JFG helps to create justice for…girls need to know about this organization.
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