CorStone: Girls First

Over the past decade, CorStone has developed, researched, and delivered personal resilience programs that cultivate skills, attitudes, and supports that catalyze youth to overcome difficulties, unleash their potential and live flourishing lives. Our approach has provided some of the first evidence that fostering resilience is key to improving mental and physical health, gender equality, and education.

Girls in the Girls First program attend facilitated peer support groups, led by trained schoolteachers, one hour per week. The 6-month program provides in-depth training in topics such as character strength development, social-emotional and communication skills, goal-setting, problem-solving, conflict resolution, reproductive and sexual health and gender rights.

In 2019, at the request of the Bihar Education Ministry, CorStone initiated a multi-year scale-up of Girls First in 268 KGBVs serving 50,000 at-risk girls across the state. In 2022 we plan to expand to additional states. You may view additional details of our work here.