Having read and understood the ​guidelines​, I attest to the best of my knowledge that I am

eligible to apply for a DFW grant.

Is the project for which you are seeking funding intentionally focused on
poverty-alleviation and the empowerment of women and/or girls in a developing country?

Will your 990s show that the operating expense of your organization (or fiscal sponsor)
was at least $100,000 during the past fiscal year?

Our organization (and Fiscal Sponsor, if applying with a Fiscal Sponsor) is NOT a college
or university in the United States.

Our organization has not been a Dining for Women Featured Grantee.

Organization Name, Address, EIN, Organization Website

Colors of Connection. P.O. Box 55444, Shoreline, WA, 98155. 46-4114716.

www.colorsofconnection.org

Organization Mission and History (max 100 words)

Colors of Connection’s mission is to engage conflict-affected youth and communities

worldwide in collaborative art-making to nurture hope, cultivate well-being, and promote
self-determination. Through mural-making, we invest in building knowledge and skill sets that
strengthen youth’s emotional and social capabilities, develop their leadership skills, and enable
them to effect social change.
CC has completed eight projects and 17 murals in refugee camps and post-war areas in
Sub-Saharan Africa, directly benefiting 205 youth and reaching 200,000 residents.​ Our current
programs serve adolescent girls, and we have previously engaged communities​ on issues of
health, peace between ethnic groups, and human rights.

Contact name, title, phone number, email address

Christina Mallie, Program Director/Co-Founder, (646) 515-8589,

christina@colorsofconnection.org.

Year founded ​2011

Organization’s annual budget ​$143,000

What is the total size of your US board? ​Nine members

How many members of your US BOD are women? ​Eight

How many members of your US BOD are men? ​One

Project Title ​Shujaa

Grant amount requested (between $25k-$35k) ​$27,700

Are you requesting that the grant be distributed over two years? ​No

Country of project location ​Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

City or Region of Project location ​Goma

Issue area (from a drop-down menu)

women’s leadership, education

Need addressed by project (max 100 words)

Goma, in Eastern DRC, has been affected by war for decades, leaving lasting
reverberations across a society with historically-rooted gender inequalities. The sustained
conflict has aggravated traditional socio-cultural norms and beliefs around gender roles, and
normalized and exacerbated sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). As a result, adolescent
girls are some of the most excluded from societal benefits and protections. An overwhelming
majority have experienced SGBV, and approximately ​40% do not even complete primary
school. COVID-19 has only intensified the marginalization and violence girls experience daily
and made the need even more urgent to invest in their resilience and recovery.

Women’s leadership (max 150 words)

Women’s leadership is nurtured at all levels of the Shujaa program and within the
structure of the implementing organizations. Colors of Connection is led by women staff and a
majority female board. We are collaborating with a local women-led art collective called
Mshujarts to realize the program, as well as receiving technical support from the Population
Council, which has the world's​ largest body of research on programs to improve the lives of
adolescent girls in developing countries.​ The Shujaa program cultivates female leadership on
multiple levels: adolescent girls learn leadership skills and civic engagement in the program,
young women of the community provide mentorship and role modeling to the participants, and
young women staff lead the program. This model presents opportunities for sustainability with
its cascading leadership design: participants can become future mentors, and mentors can
become future staff.

Project description (max 450 words)

The Shujaa program will provide out-of-school, marginalized adolescent girls in Goma
the opportunity for psychosocial and life skills development, inform girls about their sexual and
reproductive health, and foster and enrich their community participation through public art
engagement which will be transformational to their present and future lives. Starting with forty
girls and expanding over the course of five years to 360 girls, this program will empower
adolescent girls in Goma to effect change for themselves and their community in the pursuit of
equality and freedom from violence.

The program curriculum will be given in weekly sessions, year-round, and will build
assets that prepare girls to excel in their lives: socially, emotionally, cognitively, health-wise,
creatively and economically. Girls will gain skills such as identifying and expressing their
emotions, recognizing the safety risks in their community and how to avoid them, understanding
the biological basics of sexuality and reproduction, and having short term financial goals and a
plan to meet them. In addition, we will pair girl participants with young women mentors from the
community who will become role models for the girls as they form supportive and positive
relationships. In turn, these young women’s leadership skills will be cultivated by their roles
within the program. All girls attending the program will be eligible to receive a scholarship if they
wish to return to school and continue up to the level of gaining their high school diploma. Both
participants and mentors will engage the broader community through public art, sparking
constructive societal conversations on gender equality and gender norms.

The program has impact on three levels in year 1:

Individual: 40 girls will build creative, social-emotional, economic, health and cognitive
assets, positioning them to better understand and express themselves and meet their needs.
They will have increased knowledge of, and access to, community resources and services in
health, creative expression, education, and local government. Girls will build relationships with
peers, mentors, and role models.
Community: 40 community stakeholders will be engaged and invested in empowering
adolescent girls through providing input on girl-focused issues for the public artworks. ​560
community members will have increased knowledge of how GBV impacts girls in their
community and strategies to address it, through both public art (two murals and 25 posters) and
public forums. And 180,000 community members will have increased positive perceptions about
the capacity of women and girls in society through viewing public artworks.
Organizational: GAC staff will have increased capacity in the areas of recruitment tools
and methods, facilitation skills for creative expression programming, knowledge-base in areas of
reproductive health, economic literacy, and ​sexual and gender-based violence prevention and
response. They will have the capacity to take over leadership of the program.
Key collaborations with other organizations (max 100 words)

We will partner on this program with a locally-led young women and girls’ art group,
M’Shujarts! A Girls Arts Collective (GAC) and the Population Council, a leader in the field of
developing, strengthening and measuring programs for adolescent girls. Through this
partnership, CC will provide training and technical support for GAC to become an independent
and sustainable woman and girl-led organization serving the girls of their community. ​After
working closely with GAC to build their capacity in organizational and program management
over the five-year period, full leadership of Shujaa will be transitioned to GAC by 2025.

What makes this project unique? (max 100 words)

We engage participants and community with an underutilized approach in conflict affected

environments: creativity. We harness the power of creativity and public art to achieve broad
social norms change, and to build essential life skills for our girl participants.
Our work incorporates evidence-based tools and resources from our partner, the Population
Council, who specialize in practices created to effectively reach and engage the poorest girls
from the poorest communities.

We work in solidarity with communities in a collaborative bottom-up approach, to transform the

problematic power dynamics between aid agencies and the communities served.

Have you previously applied for a DFW grant? If so, in what year? ​No

Is the grant requested a continuation of a previously funded project? If yes, describe. ​No

How did you hear about Dining for women?

We’ve been in dialogue with Mind Leaps, grantees of Dining for Women, collaborating on
program tools and curriculum.

Files to attach

● program/project budget. Indicate clearly within your budget what you would like
DFW to fund
● IRS form 990 (full copy, most recent year)
● IRS form 990 (full copy, previous year)
● IRS 501(c)3 determination letter
● Organization’s balance sheet