La Tiendita, the entrepreneurial training program of The Lower Eastside Girls Club, trains and employs high school girls, college students and Lower East Side mothers. La Tiendita sells Girl-Made and Fair-Trade products. All proceeds support our free programs at The Lower Eastside Girls Club Center for Community on Avenue D and our sister programs world-wide. The Girls Club has been operating a booth in the ‘old’ Essex Market for more than a decade, providing hundreds of teens with their first jobs and the business skills needed in today’s economy, helping college students earn their tuition, and enabling neighborhood mothers to re-enter the work force.

The Lower Eastside Girls Club: History and Mission

The Lower Eastside Girls Club was founded in 1996 to address the disparities of opportunity in a low-income community that had ‘boys only’ youth clubs.  With few assets other than grit and determination, mothers in the community decided that the time had come to change that situation. In less than two decades, The Lower Eastside Girls Club bought land on the Lower East Side, held a successful $20 million capital campaign, and built a state-of-the-art 35,000 square foot Center for Community on Avenue D – in the farthest reaches of Manhattan, in the midst of public housing.

Our education programs, serving over 500 teen age girls and their families per week, expose young women to an innovative and comprehensive mix of academic, athletic, entrepreneurial, financial, artistic, cultural, family life and wellness, science and technology, service learning, leadership, and world of work experiences. Our public programs – conferences, school group visits to our planetarium, bio labs and art gallery- reach thousands more per week.

We Mean Business: Furthering our Entrepreneurial Mission

We take our mission statement: ‘raising the next generation of environmental, ethical and entrepreneurial leaders’ seriously.  All of our entrepreneurial training projects and businesses fall under the We Mean Business program. The Lower Eastside Girls Club launched our first entrepreneurial training program shortly after our founding, purchasing a catering kitchen on Avenue B and opening The Sweet Things Bake Shop. From there we branched into running several seasonal Farm Girls outdoor farmer’s markets.

Today, in addition to our baking ventures we run two public “Girl-Made and Fair Trade” gift shops: La Tiendita on Avenue C and in the Essex Street Market; Celebrate Café, a culinary training center in our new building; and a robust sewing and design business entitled Made By Us, which produces a line of “Kitchen Couture” (aprons, potholders, placemats, tea towels), handmade soaps and gift items. The Girls Club currently employs dozens of teenage young women and their mothers in these entrepreneurial enterprises.

Spring Fling
Wednesday, April 10, 2019 — 6-11pm
Angel Orensanz Foundation — 172 Norfolk Street, New York, NY

Now more than ever, girls matter!
Celebrate over two decades of our groundbreaking work raising the next generation of leaders. Honorees and special guests to be announced.

For more information, please contact: benefit@girlsclub.org

About the Exhibit

OUR ELEMENTS 2019

Opening January 5, 6-9pm
Through January 12, 2019

136 Avenue C, New York, NY

featuring:
Tikka Masala
Meryl Feigenberg
Courtney Alexander
Naomi Elena Ramirez
Dana Nechmad
M (this year in solidarity)

A collaborative exhibition of queer and feminist artists, in its second iteration, working in a variety of mediums whose work interacts with the political, social, and cultural conditions of gender, sexuality, economics, and politics and exploring ideas of bodies, time, emotional labor, place, and the interplay between identity and medium. This project aims to think about what it means to be an individual, in a collective, and find a safe space to process the political trauma that is wreaking havoc on intersectional bodies. This means women, queers, immigrants, people of color, folks with different ability statuses, among other factors under current political, economic, and cultural conditions. The artists employ different tools including sculpture, spatial intervention, illustration, video, audio, text, performance, and social media to explore such ideas and how it relates to them. In this the second iteration of Our Elements, we explore the oppression and emancipation of our bodies and perceptions, the gift of sight afforded by being an other, love and connection, loss and moving on.

AOTProject.org