Nadia Moritz is the founding director of the Young Women’s Project, a program established in 1992 that aims to provide leadership, training, employment opportunities, project work and other services so that teens can educate and organize their peers and work to bring about policy changes that benefit young women.
How does the program work?
We build teen women leaders in Washington, D.C. We provide support and training to teenage women so they can not only improve their own lives but also develop community-based projects and improve the institutions that are affecting their lives.
What are some examples?
The school system, the foster care system, policies that affect access to reproductive health care. We have a teen staff we train as advocates and they conduct campaigns. Right now we have a campaign that is focused on reproductive health.
We train them as advocates and they testify in front of the D.C. Council and work with the mayor’s office.
How many teens are in the program?
We work directly with 300 teens a year, bringing them into the program and training them as leaders. We probably reach about 1,000 or more teens through our work.
How did you get involved with the program?
I was one of the collective members who started the program. I came here right after college to do journalism and writing, and then I got involved on the activism and training policy end of things.
At the time, I was a very young woman and dealing with some of the same issues personally. It was kind of a self-education, peer support, self-empowerment project.
What’s the job’s most rewarding aspect?
The work we do has pretty significant impact on the lives of the women that we work with. You can really see the changes in the women when they come into the program and when they leave the program. Teen women are just such a powerful group with so much potential and I think the reason we are successful is we really tap into that and put it to good use in the community
