About-Face

Vision: For all teen girls in the United States to have the power of their voice to fight back against sexist cultural limitations.

About-Face arms girls with tools to fight back against a culture that diminishes and disempowers them. We work with self-identified girls ages 13-18 in their schools and elsewhere to teach them critical-thinking and skills centered on understanding and critique of our mainstream culture, including media and social media. We then transform that knowledge into activism skills that they use throughout their lives. About-Face is in the San Francisco Bay Area and is expanding its online and on-the-ground presence nationwide.

Each About-Face program follows the basic framework of our theory of change:
Education -> Action -> Change

Our Education Into Action program works with teenage girls and non-binary youth in their schools and organizations, directly engaging students in thought about what they see in media (including social media) to learn how it manipulates emotions, sells products, and affects self-worth. Then, the youth learn to translate that learning into social change. About-Face also offers workshops for parents and teachers to teach them the same skills.

Our online presence program provides similar resources and inspiration for media education and social change via a website and social media like Instagram and Facebook.

Education: About-Face has reached more than 8,000 students in Bay Area since 2007 through our programs that teach media decoding.

Action: We’ve enabled more than 20 girl-led action events, from putting up positive decals on fitting-room mirrors in San Francisco’s main shopping area, to hosting an inner beauty fashion show, to asking passers-by to write something they like about themselves on a big sign and take a photo with it.

Change: We’ve helped make major transformations, with girls -- now women -- coming back years later to tell us stories of how they’re now more ready to make change in their worlds and within themselves.

We have a track record of creating real impact for the girls in our programs. When we measured our impact using a rigorous evaluation process, we found significant changes. After just one short workshop session, participants said they felt:

- Like it was less important to look like famous people from media — and less possible, even if people try hard

- Happier with their appearance

- And a decreased frequency of going on diets or changing eating habits (Dieting is the number-one cause of eating disorders.)

In 5 to 10 years from now, we will be:
- Reaching students in at least 50% of Bay Area middle and high schools (we’ve served about 200 so far)
- Developing a presence in 5 U.S. cities
- Enabling an Action Squad of teen girls who regularly take action online and in person
- Supporting those girls as they go on to teach our programs