Empowerment: More Examples!

"FC Forza "

What is this project about?

The music world is known as a "dominant male world". Female singers are often the backing vocals.

The devaluation of female singers to an "object of lust" emphasizes the stereotype of incompetent women. In many cases, the female singer doesn't create her own lyrics, which all is linked with a dominant male class in the music world whose opinion is that female singers are not competent nor professional musicians.

FC Forza is a local group initiative, (within the YiA programme) from a diverse, intercultural group of female teenagers living in different cities in Belgium, which aims to create opportunities to record a full album and make a video clip.
The passion they share is music. When it comes to singing, most of them only had the opportunity to do backing vocals in teenage male projects.

Context

The background of these girls is very diverse: they all come from different social layers of the society, 5 different nationalities, some are legal citizens - some are not, all in the age range of 16 till 20. They all come from specific areas in different cities. It is a first step to become more aware of the size and possibilities of the whole country.

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Aims

• The FC Forza project gives them the opportunity to cooperate with other girls of their age and to develop their own style, songs and music.
  
• It create opportunities for intercultural learning, cooperation with girls from different social backgrounds, respecting inter-religious differences and dialogue.
  
• When working and taking decisions together, they strengthen their self confidence and their thrust in other people.
  
• The project creates opportunities to improve their technical skills such as multimedia, singing skills, performing skills etc, by developing their own CD and video clip.

Impact

Participating into this project creates opportunities for them to investigate and negotiate the impact of individual choices on their personal well being, their family and community.

They invest their capacities in an environment that offers them an educational frame. Meaning: a group initiative within the Youth in Action frame creates opportunities for these young women to choose for specific opportunities that fit into their personal wishes (dreams), challenges and broader family and community.

The diversity in the group and interpersonal processes between the girls, create opportunities to share and learn from each other's opinion, on an individual level but also on collective level, concerning current and mutual themes that concern them. For example: discrimination, racism, ...
They discover - by learning by doing - that the quality of the creative process is very much linked with the way they show respect and in what way they communicate with each other.

Music is a method to gather these girls with the same interest on a common theme, put them in a process in order to reach objectives related to their emancipation, participation and empowerment, on an individual but also community level.

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