WHO
We have been dying to tell you some big news and it’s finally time to share it!! We’ve had conversations with hundreds of women about their relationship to beauty, confidence and self-love and the more we listened the more we understood how the growing epidemic of low self-esteem is negatively impacting our lives. We felt called to act. Motivated to create something that could change the way we see ourselves and catapult our potential for greatness to a whole new level. Today we are excited to announce the launch of our partnership with Free To Be Talks and the release of a new positive body image program for youth called FREE TO BE.
WHAT
Developed by Renae Regehr, Free To Be is a research-based positive body image program for youth in grades six to eight. Free To Be empowers boys and girls to reach their full potential by developing media literacy awareness, cultivating individual strengths, building resilience to social pressures that impact body image, and nurturing a positive social environment.
Sessions are interactive and include small and large group discussions, role-playing, brainstorming, sharing, and positive activism activities. Free To Be is taught in schools by a trained facilitator in 5-7 sessions or can be adapted into shorter presentations.
RAW Beauty Talks wants to send 1,000 kids in the Lower Mainland through the program in 2016 and in order to do so we need to raise $10,000 through our CrowdRise crowdfunding campaign.
WHY
Youth ages 8-18 years old spend 7.5 hours every day consuming media: watching TV, visiting social media sites, perusing the Internet, playing video games and listening to music. Media influences our attitudes and beliefs about what we can and cannot, or should and should not, aspire to be in life.
Impact on girls: If you have been exposed to mainstream media then it is not surprising to learn that girls and women are unrealistically depicted: Women are drastically photoshopped, surgically enhanced, portrayed thinner and thinner, ethnically homogenous, and are rarely over the age of 40 years old. Women are valued primarily for their physicality and sexuality.
Impact on boys: Over the last decade there has been an increased focus to understand boy’s body image as boys are reporting increased concerns over what it means to look and act like a male. In media, men are increasingly sexually objectified, depicted with unrealistic muscular body types, and portrayed as powerful characters with little capability or interest in emotional or relational issues.
Bottom line: Both girls and boys grow up seeing limiting portrayals of what femininity and masculinity encompasses. The unrealistic depictions we see in media are the norm in our Western culture and we are being negatively affected mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
WHEN
A CrowdRise crowdfunding platform will be launching on June 7, 2016. We are hoping to achieve the crowdfunding goal of $10,000 by the end of June so that funding is in place for the start of the fall 2016 school year.
WHERE
The program will be available in the Lower Mainland in 2016 with the goal of expanding throughout Canada in 2017.
Learn more at freetobetalks.com.
