Joy Heuer on Teaching Life Skills to Girls (While Running)

Some of the most important years of our development, when we're learning communication skills and how to navigate the world, are spent in the jungles of the elementary school or middle school playground and classroom. It can be very easy to learn the wrong lessons, struggle with friends, and end up carrying those challenges into the future. All of this is especially true for girls, who face a unique set of challenges on top of everything else.

Girls on the Run Sierras is working to help fill that social and emotional learning gap by teaching girls from 3rd-8th grade important skills for self esteem, choosing friends, talking about emotions and relationships, and much more during an after-school program based around (but not actually focused on) running.

Over the course of a 10-week season, girls might learn about how to choose the right friends for them and how to let the wrong friends go, how to properly name their emotions and the healthiest way to deal with them, what steps they might take to move towards their dreams, and they do it all while preparing for a 5k run with no clocks, and where every girl's race bib is number 1.

On this episode, Executive Director for Girls on the Run Sierras Joy Heuer joins the show to talk about the GOTR programs and philosophy, the importance of inclusion for all girls, creating equitable access to after-school programs, how the lessons learned in GOTR are brought back to the classroom and into the home, and so much more.

GOTR has Spring and Fall programs, as well as a summer camp, and more information can be found at https://www.girlsontherunsierras.org/

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