About Girls Rock Camp Austin
Mission
Girls Rock Camp Austin is a nonprofit dedicated to empowering girls and women of all backgrounds and abilities through musical education and performance.
Description
Girls Rock Camp Austin is a day camp exclusively for girls. Qualified counselors will instruct campers in guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, and vocals. Armed with fresh, enhanced skills, campers will form bands and learn to write original songs together to perform at the camp's finale.
In workshops, girls will learn about:
- Team-building
- Women who rock
- Decoding images of girls and women in popular culture
- Exploring gender/identity issues
- Music journalism and 'zine making
- How to get started in the music business
- Silk screening, self-defense, and more
Goals and Organization
By providing a positive, all-female environment that offers musical instruction as well as a variety of workshops and performances, the camp creates leadership opportunities, cultivates a supportive community of peers and mentors, and encourages social change and the development of life skills.
Our primary goal is building girls' self-esteem through musical performance and artistic creativity. This is not a camp for the American Idol-inclined. Turning girls into stars is not our main goal, although it would not necessarily be a bad by-product. Rather, we are a nonprofit dedicated to empowerment.
The Board of Directors oversees the organization and acts as a central decision-making body. The function of the board is to ensure that the camp upholds its mission; to set a direction and long-term goals for the organization; to advocate for and represent the organization in order to promote its welfare; to help bring resources to the organization; and to monitor, oversee, and assure the financial, programming, ethical, legal, and governmental integrity of the organization.
The current roster of board members is: Roseana Auten, Melinda Chow, Emily Marks, Dr. Jennifer Price and Cindy Widner.
Girls Rock Camp Austin also depends on the hard work, advice, and support of many individual volunteers, donors and business sponsors. Volunteers are essential to both the existence and the spirit of the camp.
Girls Rock Camp Alliance
In February 2007, seven girls-rock-camp organizations gathered for a first official conference. The development sessions and workshops resulted in the groups establishing the Girls Rock Camp Alliance (GRCA). All members of the GRCA share similar missions, values, and ideas about how to run a successful girls-rock camp.
Girls Rock Camp Austin strives to embody the core values of GRCA. They are:
- We value the power of music as a means to create personal and social change;
- We value efforts that actively expand opportunities for girls and women;
- We value positive approaches to fighting sexism;
- We value integrity, honesty, and respect;
- We value appropriate sharing of resources, cooperation, and collaboration;
- We value using our collective voice to further our mission;
- We value diversity.