In a room of 25 girls, 36 per cent felt worthy of love and respect, under half the group had at least one safe adult to trust, and just 16 per cent could identify red flags of financial abuse and coercive control.
Despite the gravity of the statistics, a life-altering program would soon turn these attitudes around and help the girls to develop critical confidence and autonomy.
Jessica Brown’s Young Warrior Woman Program includes core components designed to build resilience. The girls participating are matched up with a mentor, participate in weekly training sessions for financial literacy and learn broadly how to take control of their lives.
By the end of six months, the number of girls who felt they were worthy of love and respect doubled, three quarters of the group could now recognise when they were being financially abused and 100 per cent of the group now had a safe adult to trust.
Brown founded the Warrior Woman Foundation (WWF) in 2020 with the vision to do exactly what the 2021 Young Warrior Woman program achieved: advancing women and achieving equality for all.
“It’s been a passion of mine. It’s kind of been my life’s journey,” she tells Women’s Agenda.
“I have always focused on supporting young women to be able to make positive choices for a better future.”
Fulfilling this passion received a significant boost in May this year, when WWF received a grant of more than half a million dollars from the Coca-Cola Australia Foundation to support running the Young Warrior Woman program. The funding will enable them to fund 120 more young women through the program over the next three years in the Sydney and Newcastle area.
“We are very grateful that they were able to see our mission, vision and purpose and what we have achieved in such a short amount of time. We’re trying to break long term intergenerational negative social issues in an innovative way,” Brown says.
“I think sometimes we just have to think outside the box to do things differently than what we’ve done in the past.”
Women’s Agenda spoke to Brown in the lead up to her joining The Coca-Cola Company’s ‘Level the Playing Field’ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summit in Sydney on Friday August 18. As part of the momentum surrounding the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, the Summit is a forum for global and local business leaders to convene to spotlight women and underrepresented groups in an effort to power progress towards a level playing, on and off the football pitch. Coca-Cola has been a supporter of the FIFA Women’s World Cup since its inception in 1991.
Brown joins other keynote speakers in the summit, including Malala Yousafzai, Dylan Alcott, Saudi woman’s rights activist Manal Al-Sharif and many more.
A call from the universe
Jessica Brown was a high school teacher in southwest Sydney before commencing a leadership career in the charity sector 20 years ago.
Teaching, she says, inspired her to start her charity career.
“I saw so many young boys and girls falling through the cracks and not flourishing in the classroom,” she says.
“I thought, where do I start with helping break the cycle of abuse and neglect?”
Brown started with “the mothers of the next generation” – young women and girls aged 17-25. She founded her first charity, SISTER2sister, in 2003, which matched teenage girls with a mentor and gave them a strong female role model in their lives.
“Young people are deemed to be able to look after themselves at that particular age in life,” she said.
“But if they’ve been through abuse and neglect… they’re not equipped with the skills that an 18-year-old would have living in a supportive environment with family support.”
Brown ran SISTER2sister for 17 years before deciding to change course in 2020 establishing the Warrior Woman Foundation, as the COVID-19 pandemic created a devastating impact on key sectors employing young women, like hospitality and the care sector.
“Everyone was hit by COVID. Everyone was affected by COVID,” she says.
“But young women were particularly impacted because so many of them are in the hospitality industry and the caring industries. Unemployment became rife for women.
“The universe got me to start this charity in the middle of COVID for a reason.”
Small organisation, big dreams
Targeting young women, especially those coming out of the foster care system, the WWF’s Young Warrior Woman program is an evidence-based approach to connecting this marginalised group to a community, providing mental health support, most importantly, teaching them life skills – lessons Brown wished she knew when she left home at 18 years of age.
Every week, for the duration of the six-month program, the mentors check-in with their mentees to see how they are getting on.
As Brown explains, some of the participants have just finished their high school exams and have gotten their first part time job, but they’re thinking about what they’re going to do next. Others are at university. Some have jobs. And others again are still trying to work it all out.
“So that’s why the mentors are there, to be able to support them at their particular part of their journey,” she says.
The main focus of the foundation’s program targeting underrepresented women is financial literacy. “Teaching women who come from a wide range of backgrounds – from migrants, to international students, to First Nations women, to girls coming out of the foster care system – helps them take charge of their own lives,” she says.
The financial literacy training includes teaching them to budget, save money, file their tax return and understand their superannuation.
Financial literacy is key
Australia is ranked in the top ten countries with the highest levels of financial literacy, but the real issue lies in the gap between women and men, Brown says.
The University of Western Australia (UWA) collated data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey from 2020, which found while 63 per cent of men are financially literate, only 48 per cent have a basic understanding of financial literacy concepts.
“But women, for example, who are migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds have a financial literacy rate of 40.5 per cent,” Brown says.
“That’s why we work with underrepresented women because, at the end of the day, they’re all the mothers of the next generation.
“We just need to give them equal education opportunities.”
Brown lives for “the penny-drop moment” that these women have during the program – the moment they realise they can do things, like sorting their finances, for themselves.
“(Before the program) they don’t have the capacity, or the belief in themselves,” she says.
“That makes me so sad.”
But the community at the WWF, the “group of cheerleaders” as Brown says, help build back that confidence and support that has been missing in the lives of these young women for too long.
“We want to start a movement, a movement of supportive women helping other women within the community,” she says.
“We’re a small organisation, but we’ve got massive dreams.”
Levelling the playing field
Brown will sit on a panel during the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summit, held in Sydney on Friday August 18.
With three pillars – education, opportunity and systemic change – the summit takes place as women continue to break down the barriers in women’s sport. Australia and New Zealand have hosted the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, with the Final set to take place on Sunday August 20.
The Australian Matildas have excelled further than ever before in a World Cup, and Australian fans have broken viewer records. The quarter-final match against France, where they won in the longest-ever World Cup penalty shoot-out, became the most-watched national sporting event in 18 years.
Football is leading the way in levelling the playing field for women, but the summit aims to focus on fields other than the playing pitch, including workplaces.
The summit’s goal is to move away from reactive approaches that focus solely on supporting underrepresented people, a system that perpetuates inequality in businesses, society, politics and other sectors. As the program states: “It’s not about changing the player; it’s about changing the field they are playing on.”