Future Solution Now (FUSON)

Since education has been recognized and acknowledged as the right of every girl child globally and the key to transforming her life and that of her community, without education, girls are denied the opportunity to develop their full potential, lead a productive life and assume equal roles in their families, societies, countries, and the world at large. Well-documented evidence shows that educating girls and women also yields significant social and health benefits by reducing the rate of violence against women, enabling them to leave abusive relationships, and empowering them to reject adverse cultural practices, such as female genital mutilation. MDG3 has one target which is to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education.

A wide body of research shows that participation and success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) courses is a gateway for participation in nontraditional careers for women and girls which provides substantial economic and employment benefits to them and their communities. Problematic is that career counseling and recruitment that relies on gender stereotypes is still pervasive in the career and technical education system as well as the impact of gender-biased career guidance practices which can deter students especially girls of African Ancestry from participating in nontraditional training programs. Supporting in and out-of-school learning opportunities as a strategy for promoting STEM career choice, development, and success is pertinent among girls within this population. The shift in the country’s demographics requires us to rethink how we identify and cultivate talent and invest in diversity. 

Furthermore, in an increasingly competitive and global economy, the factors that create real barriers to girls’ participation in fields that are nontraditional for their gender cannot be ignored. STEM skills play an increasingly important role in the 21st Century economy. However, significant opportunity gaps exist in STEM education and careers for women, especially for girls of African Ancestry. Refugees and African Immigrant girls remain underrepresented in Nontraditional Occupations for Women in Minnesota. Ensuring that more girls are aware of and supported in STEM education and careers is critical not only for achieving economic equity for girls and their families in Minnesota but also for building a competitive workforce. To adequately open training and career pathways to girls of African Ancestry in STEM, STEM education and career must be more engaging and inclusive by increasing access to STEM learning and role models for them while addressing implicit biases and stereotypes. 

FUSON equips, trains, and supports girls of African Ancestry to help them become aware of all career opportunities in STEM while encouraging them to recognize their personal skills and abilities by leveraging ethnic entrepreneurship to fill an ethnic niche using culturally appropriate strategies. Our solution is to address the disparities built into science education systems, especially for students of color, students who speak first languages other than English, and students from low-income communities, who have had limited access to high-quality, meaningful opportunities to learn science. Using the STEM Justice approach,  we are able to direct science education and learning toward social justice. FUSON contributes to cultural self-determination and racial justice by confronting the repercussions of injustice and supporting liberatory approaches to STEM education. To achieve these, our specific activities are as follows:

- Organizing Community Conversations and distributing Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) flyers and materials to inform girls of African Ancestry and their families in K - 12 to become aware of STEM education and career.

- Conducting assessment services to determine barriers and needs in STEM education and to create an Individual Service Strategy (ISS) for each of the girls of African Ancestry successfully recruited.

- Providing incentivized STEM Career training sessions online and, in person. It is designed to equip girls of African Ancestry who have little or no knowledge about STEM education and career with the knowledge and skills they need for STEM career development and choice through a rigorous academic and technical curriculum. Topics that are covered include STEM career planning, STEM career pathways exploration, and training opportunities/search techniques. 

- Organizing Essential Life Skills Empowerment (ELSE) workshops that are culturally and linguistically appropriate to promote their psychosocial competence.

- Providing supportive services such as mentoring programs to match girls of African Ancestry with high-caliber mentors who will guide them through the program and support them as they develop their skills and pursue their individual goals. Mentors are selected from partnering organizations to meet one-on-one at least once a month (or more frequently if needed). During these meetings, they review their progress in relation to their individual goals, set new goals as appropriate, problem-solve obstacles, and ensure access to needed services. Through role-playing, many young people consider nontraditional careers when they observe role models with whom they can relate. Participants are connected with women employed in high-tech fields which provides them access to STEM organizations that support girls in high-tech careers as well as Female Techpreneur (female entrepreneur who starts and manages their own technology).

- Providing Life coaching with the aim of helping beneficiaries determine and achieve personal goals using multiple methods that help them with the process of setting and reaching their goals.

- Providing Cultural Healing Services to get the participants grounded and centered, learn about self-identity, self-esteem, and self-advocacy skills which enables beneficiaries to express themselves adequately, improve their psychosocial well-being as well as rebuild their souls through creativity which helps them on their road to self-sufficiency.

FUSON Project is designed to facilitate an increased awareness so that girls of African Ancestry can participate in activities that will make them increasingly aware of the intersecting sites of subordination and discrimination they face as girls of color and how this impacts them from achieving academic and career success in STEM. The idea that the lives of girls of color are diverse does not only make them experience subordination and inequality solely based on gender, but also on the basis of exclusion, discrimination, race, and cultural orientation. 

Many of these young girls experienced trauma as a result of violence and may have lost part of their support network when moving to the United States. Some also have traumatized and overwhelmed parents who are not able to attend to their emotional and academic needs. After arriving in the United States, youth whose parents are unable to obtain stable employment may live in poverty, in overcrowded apartments, or in unsafe neighborhoods. Discrimination and acculturation stress can also lead to a greater risk of mental health problems. In addition, second-generation youth (U.S.-born youth of immigrant parents) have been found to be at greater risk of substance abuse, conduct disturbance, and eating disorders than first-generation youth. A variety of stressors, including chronic stressors related to trauma, discrimination, and an insecure cultural identity, may contribute to this observed difference. They have limited access to STEM opportunities and culturally appropriate mental health services and they face cultural and linguistic barriers to getting help. One of the most substantial barriers is that most recent immigrants and refugees come from cultures where getting help carries a stigma. People with limited English proficiency are also less likely than others to seek and receive support of any type.

At any given time, between 14 and 20 percent of children, youth, and young adults are experiencing some type of mental health or social-emotional disorder. Though they might have achieved success and acculturated in the US, studies show that most of these youths these days are under a lot of stress, both self-imposed and from external sources such as pressure to be beautiful, from peers, to be talented, to succeed academically, have a lot of friends, to master constantly changing technology and be compliant. All these make them fragmented or disintegrated with a negative impact on their psychosocial well-being which if unaddressed can lead to life-changing consequences such as a decline in personal relationships, poorer school grades, lower self-esteem, a higher risk of unprotected sex, teen pregnancy, and even suicide which is the leading cause of death for 10 to 24 years old.

African immigrant and refugee youths arriving in a new country face a number of stressful situations. These include dealing with the loss of family members, unsatisfactory employment and isolation, lack of English skills, and lack of skills and competencies needed for work, college, and life. While moving from one culture to another inevitably entails stress, it does not necessarily threaten mental health. The mental health of immigrant and refugee youths becomes a concern primarily when additional risk factors combine with the stress of migration. They tend to be disadvantaged in terms of access to information, economic opportunities, social support, and socioeconomic status and may experience adverse life outcomes. In many other industrialized countries, this phenomenon of youth disadvantage and disconnection has already been recognized as the so-called NEET – Not in Education, Employment, or Training – challenge. This was the situation of some of our staff and volunteers whose experiences are similar to that of the young people being served when they arrived in the USA. They live in the community, know the community, and have had success in similar initiatives. They are culturally trained, understand systemic racism, and are also culturally well-versed in community engagement for both youth and adult populations. They have cultural similarities with the young people being served which are adapted to the cultural contexts and values of the targeted beneficiaries.

REFA has a multilingual staff and volunteers that include African immigrants, African Americans, and refugees who are capable of culturally tailoring messages for our project beneficiaries. Cultural tailoring is the extent to which ethnic/cultural characteristics, experiences, norms, values, behavior patterns, and beliefs of a target population, as well as relevant historical, environmental, and social forces, are incorporated into the design, delivery, and evaluation of targeted STEM activities, materials, and programs. Accordingly, the STEM program activities are delivered with the community at the center, and culturally tailored STEM services are provided while also sharing lessons learned with one another and disseminating newly developed educational materials, both to the communities and more broadly.
Cultural tailoring has improved the effectiveness of our program in developing messages specific to girls of African Ancestry situations. The cultural sensitivity of program staff, volunteers, and mentors has played a valuable role in improving this program The program activities are delivered in a culturally and linguistically appropriate and competent manner by 1) recruiting a diverse and culturally competent staff, (2) providing translation, language assistance services, and interpreter services, (3) creating easily understood education materials and signage, and (4) ensuring that beneficiaries receive effective and respectful care.

Our solution currently serves 430 girls of African Ancestry since we started in 2020. They have participated in all the project activities including referral to other opportunities that align with our goals. 13 girls of African Ancestry have participated in the AAUW STEMEd for Girls which is an engaging, online program designed for high school girls, with a special emphasis on girls of color, and the individuals who support them. One of our girls was selected as the 2023 Flight Crew Million Girls Moonshot to represent the State of Minnesota to amplify girls' voices in the national conversation around STEM equity and work toward a future where every young girl can imagine themselves as a future engineer, builder or inventor (more information can be found here: https://www.milliongirlsmoonsh...).

People of African Ancestry are experiencing discrimination at devastating rates. From depression to premature death, the consequences of prejudice are irrefutable for this population. However, People of African Ancestry are resilient and contain strengths in the form of family, civic and community institutions, cultural traditions, ancestors’ victories, resistance struggles, and human capital that inspire them to thrive even in moments in which their very humanity is being attacked through acts of police brutality, draconian immigration practices, and exclusionary school policies. Racial and ethnic oppression along with other intersecting forms of bigotry and discrimination (e.g., sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, class exploitation, and the like) materialize in racialized trauma and reduction in life opportunities. As an immigrant, I have discovered the importance of using STEM to solve financial, technical, legal, cultural, or economic barriers. This program is designed to facilitate an increased awareness among girls of African Ancestry that will make them increasingly aware of the intersecting sites of subordination and discrimination they face as girls of color and how this impacts them from achieving academic success in STEM. I am applying to the Challenge so that I can effectively support girls of African Ancestry to explore their own identity, including cultural beliefs and practices assisting them in developing a sense of agency, to become aware that it is the responsibility of an individual to explore and discover what their personality is and how to become their best which is the Creative Self to help them develop an understanding of the driving factors that strengthen or undermine the power to explore the STEM career pathway, inspire and inform them on how to develop and practice capacities that build their resiliency in situations where multiple social identities predispose them to social inequalities, as well as teach them how to act as catalysts to understand and respect their creative self. We have taken action to use a cultural strength-based approach as part of our service delivery to girls of African Ancestry by acknowledging that it is important to provide them comprehensive and cultural strength-based services as opposed to deficit-based so they can heal, get the justice they deserve and have safe and empowered lives needed for their STEM educational attainment. We emphasize their cultural strengths to help elicit change and our cultural strength-based approach focuses on their strength and resilience rather than emphasizing their traumatic experience as their defining characteristic.

As the Team Lead, I am connected to the communities where our project is based. Community engagement with people of African Ancestry has built on social capital that is social ties, networks, and support which is associated with better community participation and ownership. They have been authentically engaged in participatory decision-making which uncovers and mobilize community assets, strengths, and resources that would have been otherwise overlooked. Key stakeholders like community members (including families), faith-based leaders (both Imams and pastors), community leaders (defined as gatekeepers, community activists/advocates, association leaders, community-wide leaders, etc), and community-based organizations have been identified and tapped for involvement. This requires a different mindset that is best described as leadership rather than management. We use a collaborative process in the needs assessment, planning, and implementation of activities. The continuum consists of three levels of community engagement which move from consultative to cooperative to collaborative, reflecting the realities of our power-sharing within the communities. Research has shown that in programs that involve high levels of community participation and control, there is greater participation. REFA shares power by mobilizing community assets, strengths, and resources that would have been otherwise overlooked for active involvement. Sustainable social change occurs in the community not only in an individual's behavior but changes in the way things are done, changes in structure, beliefs, and norms. REFA collaborates with identified key stakeholders in the communities by giving them the impetus to create the space to understand the wholeness of our projects, make them feel safe to share ideas, and using a collective impact approach, we always ensure that collaborating which is the coming together of stakeholders to implement a new program moves beyond this to a level where we all have a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, and continuous communication.  REFA has created alliances and partnerships with existing organizations in order to build trust and mechanisms for joint actions. An asset mapping was done within the communities to engage community members in identifying the resources and assets in their communities that can be mobilized to promote STEM activities and better exploration of STEM career pathways. To also authentically engage the community in this program, REFA has ensured that all individuals and organizations know what the engagement is about and what it is not about, ensure people know what is happening and how their input is being used, ensure they are connected to decision-making, ensure that they have access to the information they need to participate, ensure that there is sufficient time for them to think things through, weigh up alternatives and provide feedback, ensure the meeting venues and materials are accessible and provide a wide variety of engagement tools and methods. To enhance program ownership and sustainability, REFA has always emphasized the responsibility of community stakeholders in the planning and implementation phases of the program.

Future Solution Now (FUSON) is innovative because of the cultural strength-based approach that we are using which creates an opportunity where creativity meets technology, fun, and culture. We emphasize their cultural strengths to help elicit change in their mindset toward STEM and our cultural strength-based approach focuses on their strength and resilience rather than emphasizing their traumatic experience as their defining characteristic.

Our solution is exceptional because we provide these girls of African Ancestry with an opportunity to explore their identity within the context of their own culture as well as others to deepen their sense of self-agency and increase their openness and understanding toward difficult situations when exploring STEM career paths. Cultural Healing Practices are done as an essential component of the project because at this stage of their life and as persons with multiple identities, everything and everyone around them think they are not good enough, inadequate, a loser, incapable, unintelligent, and the list keeps going which could be psychosocially impairing and limits or reduce their career, educational, and economic potentials. All the activities in this program are empowering because they teach skills, improve their self-awareness, and encourage self-reflection. Consequently, the project prepares them for action to help them advocate for themselves and other girls as leaders in their communities.

In addition, in order to make meaningful and sustainable progress in eliminating STEM education inequities among girls of African Ancestry, REFA  is partnering with the girls by moving from isolated impact to collective impact, and to achieve this, we ensure that we have a shared vision for social change that includes a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving the problem through agreed-upon actions, agreement on the ways success will be measured and reported with a shortlist of key indicators.

REFA will adopt broad-based monitoring, evaluation, and reporting (MER) system that is aligned and tailored to respond to the information needs of the funder, diverse stakeholders, collaborators, and community partners. To systematically assess progress and provide timely information for project management and improvement, a detailed Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Plan (PMAP) will include data collection methodology, responsibilities, procedures for data quality assurance and analysis, formats for reporting, dissemination, and utilization. Within the budgetary and methodology limitations of this project, this detailed PMAP will focus on both process and outcomes evaluation. Process evaluation will be done to ensure that the most appropriate methods and strategies have been used effectively for project implementation while the outcome evaluation will ensure that the goals and objectives of the project were achieved. Using a robust research design that is evidence-based and to avoid methodological challenges in the design and analysis of this STEM intervention project, the mixed cohort and cross-sectional design will be used to evaluate the success and impact. The evaluation will be culturally responsive. A culturally responsive evaluation attempts to fully describe and explain the context of the project being evaluated by honoring the cultural context in which the evaluation is taking place by bringing needed, shared life experiences and understandings to the evaluation tasks at hand.

Progress towards our impact goals will be measured using the following strategies: 

Program-level Monitoring System: This project will routinely monitor and track program-level inputs, processes, and outputs and the extent to which objectives are achieved. The project will support project staff, beneficiaries, and volunteers in capturing routine program data including key service delivery statistics. The project will promote a mechanism of data collection that supports the measurement of critical indicators.

Strengthening Data Quality: The project will place a strong emphasis on data quality ensuring that accurate data is generated and reported by the project. The project will support capacity building in data collection, quality, and management, particularly through the capacity development of its project staff to conduct supportive supervision and provide regular technical assistance in the use of tools, storage of results, and the flow of data.

Utilization of Results of Monitoring and Evaluation Activities for Program Improvement: The project will seek to ensure that results inform program decision-making. Activities to enhance the demand and utilization of data would also be promoted. REFA will share and disseminate the project's progress and result with all stakeholders, collaborators, schools, and the communities where this project is based.

Key indicators:
The following indicators will be reported routinely include:

• Number of the targeted population reached with individual and/or small group level activities/interventions that are primarily focused on exploration/identification of stem education and career.
• Number of the targeted population reached with individual and/or small group level preventive interventions that are primarily focused on entrepreneurial opportunities.
• Number of individuals reached through creative outreach, recruitment, and engagement activities that increased awareness and provide the information needed for participation in Project FUSON.
• Number of individuals reached through STEM education and career awareness that inform girls of African Ancestry in upper elementary and junior high/middle schools, Churches/Mosques, and the community at large.
• Number of assessment services provided.
• Number of incentivized STEM career training conducted
• Number of girls of African Ancestry enrolled in Project FUSON support scheme for monitoring and support after exiting Project FUSON.
• Number of projects showcased at the FUSON community events.
• Number of scholarships awarded to execute a project to be showcased at the FUSON community events.

The population of young people that are served by our program is 100% girls of African Ancestry who face a lot of challenges due to racialized trauma leading to educational inequities. According to the Minnesota Department of Education, 25.1% of Saint Paul Public Schools’ senior class did not graduate in 2018, only 71.1 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, and 72.8% of English-language learners graduated in 2018. These are young people who enroll in poor-quality schools with fewer culturally appropriate mental health resources, more violence, and a distressed school climate and are students of color and migrant youths who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch who are more likely to set forth on a path toward worsened physical and mental health as well as poor educational outcomes. Due to the digital divide, young people of African Ancestry faced substantial technological obstacles in accessing education, and mental healthcare services which were made worse due to the COVID-19 pandemic and as a result missed the most in-person instruction during the 2019 - 2020 and 2020 - 2021 school years, and who did not consistently participate in remote instruction when offered during school building closures. Previous studies identified language and literacy issues, cultural differences in explanatory models of illness, restricted legal entitlements, social deprivation, and traumatic experiences as the main barriers to accessing and receiving quality education and healthcare. At the time of COVID-19, a lack of technology-based interventions that may help support the translation of information, reach underserved populations, and deliver culturally tailored STEM education and psychosocial programs were lacking. Schools have played a key role in fostering acculturation and language acquisition among children of African Ancestry. However, more needs to be done since the underlying logic is that feeling well psychosocially and doing well academically are intertwined. Mental health problems disrupt their learning process by keeping them out of school (ex. through absence and tardiness) or when they are present, distracting them, reducing their concentration, and constraining their full engagement. These implications are far-reaching and require that we implement this STEM project to the priority demographics that we identified.

Our solution is not tech-based, but rather we nurture, empower and support girls of African Ancestry to change the world through STEM. They can only do this by being equipped to become aware of all career opportunities in STEM while encouraging them to recognize their personal skills and abilities to STEM justice and inclusion using culturally appropriate strategies. We place cultural strength, resilience, and humanity at the center to address STEM disparities.

Five

Three years

Our organization is an African-led organization with the capacity to provide services successfully to low-income families including youths who experience barriers to employment because of the cultural similarities which are adapted to the cultural contexts and values of the targeted beneficiaries. We have members of staff that are from the communities, know the communities, and have had success in all our initiatives. They are professionally trained, understand the communities’ health and social system, and are also culturally well-versed in community engagement and inclusion for both youth and adult populations. We have expanded our mission and services significantly since its beginning, always with a core focus on cultural responsiveness while supporting education and employment services for mentally disabled youths and young adults. We provide a referral to comprehensive vocational rehabilitation services, vocational assessment, academic achievement testing, supported employment, vocational counseling and guidance, career exploration, vocational diagnosis, vocational plan development, job development/placement, follow-up services, personal support services, home-based business solutions, small business development, and vocational evaluation strategies.

The following core values form the foundation of our diversity, equity, and inclusivity:

Cultural awareness: In order to understand others, we must first understand our own culture, cultures are neither better nor worse, simply different, every human being is bound by his/her/their culture, and behind the differences among people, there are basic similarities, such as love, family, loyalty, friendship, joy.
Cultural well-being: The vitality that communities and individuals enjoy through participation in recreation, creative and cultural activities, and the freedom to retain, interpret and express their arts, history, heritage, and traditions.
Cultural connections: commitment to enhancing awareness, understanding, and appreciation of cultural diversity, social differences, and the wisdom of world cultures.

Our business model is targeted at equipping and supporting girls of African Ancestry through outreach, positive engagement, and assessment; training, skills acquisition, and support with the exploration/identification of stem career/entrepreneurial opportunities and attainment of positive stem educational/career and entrepreneurial goal, and supportive services.

A comprehensive framework for developing a sustainability work plan is being developed by effectively engaging key stakeholders (selected based on their capacity, interest, and positioning to take on the work) to define what sustainability means to our effort, and proactively develop milestones to gauge the effectiveness of this effort and how these efforts will be maintained in the long run. This will help us obtain input and buy-in from key stakeholders and external decision-makers, define critical long- and short-term funding strategies, and create an organizational plan to attract and make the best use of human, financial, and in-kind resources for achieving these strategies. In order to develop and execute this plan for securing the support needed to continue the realization of project goals and objectives successfully, we will identify other potential funding sources and increase earned income by charging a fee for high-quality service to ensure long-term sustainable funding; use participatory and collaborative approaches in the planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the project which will give community ownership of the project from the start; invest in staff training and building internal capacity to set up and maintain effective record-keeping systems; develop a risk management plan and problem-solving protocols early to facilitate the resolution of disagreements and conflicts that might arise among the stakeholders; take an active role in policy planning by seeking representation on relevant committees and boards of the State/counties/other partnering agencies to stimulate conversations about the value of our project in relation to policy development; cultivate a purpose-driven and strong leadership style that encourages input from the staff, community and other stakeholders; think and act strategically on what component of the project to sustain (ex. those having positive impacts); establish ongoing assessment of the project using evidence-based data to provide feedback to all stakeholders to show how well the project is meeting its goals and objectives and improving outcomes for the project beneficiaries; and establish clear and effective communication plan/strategies (ex. written communication, mass and electronic media, one-on-one meetings, etc.) to disseminate the effectiveness of the project which will build a strong base of key stakeholders. All these will offer us an opportunity to plan, implement, monitor, evaluate, and sustain our project beyond the funding period using the sustainability strategies highlighted above. 

Our project is currently being funded by the Believe & Build Afterschool Grant, the Women's Foundation of Minnesota girlsBEST Grant, Ramsey County Workforce Solutions, Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, and the F. R. Bigelow Foundation.