The Girls Like Us: Identifying and Understanding Mental Health Wellness Priorities Among Black Girls program aims to co-design, evaluate, and implement mindfulness, movement, and wellness strategy programming for Black adolescent girls attending Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley School District high schools.
Our research supports Black girls' resistance to the narratives of appearance bias, anti-Black racism, adultification, intergenerational trauma, and colorism.
We encourage agency and provide the girls in our program the tools to deconstruct longstanding and persistent tropes regarding Black girls while centering the lived experiences of this community of young women.
To emphasize our research with accessible and feasible impact in this community, we have collaborated with CU undergraduates, high school students, and other community experts to assess the factors that pose barriers to wellness for Black adolescent girls. In our program and research, we believe it is crucial to elicit the perspectives of the community in which we aim to serve, as a key factor in providing contextual insight to design a wellness intervention that minimizes the mental health challenges for Black high school students in Boulder County.
