This extension service project involves extending and focusing a collaborative model of networking girl-serving projects, organizations and institutions, in order to increase their capacity for continuation of activities and/or reaching a broader community. Collaboration, as an interactive process, enables professionals across projects and communities to generate and carry out creative solutions and strategies that maximize benefit beyond that which one project or community could accomplish alone. It is the intent of the expanded National Girls Collaborative Project to disseminate research-based best practices in informal learning environments and assessments and evaluation that would further advance the work of existing and evolving girl-serving projects and provide a forum to share results. The goals of this extension project are to:
1. Maximize access to shared resources within projects and with public and private sector organizations and institutions interested in expanding girls' participation in STEM. 2. Strengthen capacity of existing and evolving projects by sharing best practice research and program models, outcomes and products. 3. Use the leverage of a network or collaboration of individual girl-serving STEM programs to create the tipping point for gender equity in STEM.
The intellectual merit of this project lies in the use of the collaborative model to deliver research-based best practices to practitioners as well as the creation of a system for communicating implementation data to create a dialogue among practitioners and between researchers and practitioners.
The broader impact of this project is demonstrated by the combination of networks, organizations, educational institutions and community-based organizations engaging in structured activities designed to increase organizational capacity. Although there have been hundreds of girl-serving STEM projects and targeted strategies to close the gender gap in STEM, we may have not yet reached the tipping point that transforms these individual efforts into systemic, nation-wide change.
