Good grief, a grant!

Our Peruanas Poderosas grant is finally online, woohooooo!!

A real live website!

Now that we've taken care of that initial excitement, let me explain my enthusiasm. Peruanas Poderosas means "Powerful Peruvian Women," and it's an annual project organized by PC Peru's Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment (GenEq) committee, of which I am a member. The project's main component has always been a calendar that profiles awesome female Peruvian counterparts in PCVs' communities, with the goal of highlighting the impact of women leaders. This year, we're aiming to make the project even more effective by designing the calendar as a tool to help high school teachers create vocational orientation programs in their classrooms. The 2014 calendar will feature 12 women from different professions, and each month will not only have information on that field, but also corresponding lesson plans and materials to teach a certain skill needed in the world of work. We will then organize community events and regional workshops to celebrate the role of Peruvian women as professionals and to teach PCVs and their counterparts how to use the calendar's resources. On a big-picture level, we hope that Peruanas Poderosas will: 1) promote gender equity by dispelling the machismo myth that only men can be professionals; and 2) empower teachers to better prepare students to pursue higher education and professional careers (skills like résumé-writing, communication, and goal-setting are not part of the standard high school curriculum here).

While the project is led by the entire GenEq committee, one person has to take charge of writing the grant. So way back in February, I volunteered as grant-writer, because Peruanas Poderosas is a project I'm passionate about and grant-writing is a skill I wanted to gain during my time in the Peace Corps. Four months later, I can affirm that it is indeed as tedious a process as everyone claims it to be. But I'm glad to now have experience in writing a grant, and am excited to get moving on all the big plans we have for this project. If you'd like to support us, please click on this link to our website to make a tax-deductible donation - thank you!