Long Island Fund for Women & Girls



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Grants Program

Special Gender Equity Funding Initiative

Grantee Success Stories

Special Gender Equity Funding Initiative

In 2002, the Long Island Fund for Women and Girls provided a special round of grants for student-generated programs that help to eliminate gender-based bullying and harassment in Long Island high schools and communities. Grants were made and awarded in amounts ranging from $500 to $2,500 to a small number of school student groups in response to written proposals reflecting the criteria contained in this Request for Proposals. Total funding of $10,000 was available.

In November 2002, LIFWG was pleased to announce the following schools and community based organization as grant recipients: William Floyd School District, Greenport High School, Riverhead High School, The Gay Straight Alliance/Murphy Junior High School, Delta Minerva Life Development Center

Guidelines to Address Gender Based Bullying and Harassment -- Rationale For Funding Program

Definitions:

Bullying occurs when one person or group of people tries to physically or emotionally hurt or provoke fear in another person by saying nasty, threatening, or hurtful things to him or her again and again. The purpose of bullying is to make the bully feel powerful. The person who is bullied finds it difficult to stop this from happening and is worried or fearful it will happen again. (Example: Physically or threatening to physically keep someone from passing through the hallway)
Harassment is behavior, which is intended to trouble or annoy someone, or to make them feel uncomfortable or bad about themselves. (Example: telling sexist or racist jokes)
Although gender-based bullying and harassment are against most school policies and are not socially acceptable in the community, they remain prevalent in Long Island schools and communities.

Research on gender-based bullying and harassment concludes:
- It happens in all schools.
- It has to be acknowledged as a problem before solutions can be generated.
- While high profile campaigns at the national, local, and school level are useful ways of publicizing the problem and initiating action, on their own these campaigns are more often than not inadequate as solutions.

Research also concludes that the single most effective thing any school or community can do is to develop a strong policy against gender-based bullying and harassment, and to build commitment to the policy among pupils, teachers, school staff, students, parents and others in the community. One way of securing this commitment is to determine the extent of bullying within the school, which raises awareness and signals the school's intention to do something about the problem.

By including students in these efforts, a framework is created within which students themselves are able to help counter bullying. Three strategies that have proven useful are:

Enabling students to participate in decision making and to share responsibility at all levels
Peer counseling programs
Peer mediation programs

Funding Prerequisites

Program must be announced to the entire school building as a backdrop to the work that is being proposed.
Girls must be in leadership positions and/or they must make up the majority of students working on the project.
A faculty or administrative advisor must be assigned as liaison to the students developing the project.

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