Join our Facilitator Training in Europe

starting June 2024

A unique opportunity to become involved in pioneering work with preteen girls, led by Kim McCabe and Helena Løvendal.

Do you have an affinity for the adolescent stage of life?

  • Would you like to join a community of women supporting girls and their mothers in making the transition from girl to woman a life-enhancing experience?
  • How would it feel to become the woman that you needed when you were 11?

Girls Journeying Together groups offer a year of monthly support for preteen girls as they practice being true to themselves, learn about puberty, share their hopes and fears, and help each other into their teens.

You can acquire the skills and knowledge to deliver year-long Girls Journeying Together groups and become affiliated to a professional association.

Facilitator Training Webinar – see if this training is for you

Tuesday 19th March 7:30 – 9pm GMT
90-minute live session with Kim and Helena
Free, by invitation on registration

This is an opportunity to meet Kim and Helena, ask your questions, hear about Girls Journeying  Together groups and how you would be trained and supported to run them. We will be interested to hear what draws you to this work and can help you to decide if this training is right for you at this time in your life.

Before this session, please read our frequently asked questions website pages and the detailed information that is sent to you on registering your interest.

Our next training is in England starting in June 2024. Add yourself to our mailing list to hear about our next trainings and join the webinar for detailed information which, alongside our frequently asked questions pages, will answer many of your questions.

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Hear from our apprentice facilitators

Rites for Girls International Facilitator Training

This professional programme is taught by Kim McCabe and Helena Løvendal and is a mixture of residential group training, individual support, peer groups, written work, and supervised practical experience. The course includes three residential modules of 9 days each: June, October, and November 2024.

Start earning within months of beginning the programme!

This investment in your career provides you with meaningful employment that can fit alongside raising a family and/or other commitments. Partway into the course, participants will have the opportunity to start earning through their supervised facilitation of a Girls Journeying Together group. Within two years of qualifying you can have recouped the cost of the training fees by running your own girls’ groups.

Who can train to be a Girls Journeying Together group facilitator?

Training is being offered to women who have an affinity with preteen girls, and who already have some group-work training, counselling skills, or other relevant experience such as youth work or teaching. Please don’t hesitate to contact us to find out how your experience could lend itself to this training. We train a maximum of 20 women in a group, so once the course is full, we will hold a waiting list for our next European training in 2025.

You can make a difference! Join us in this important pioneering work.

Hear from Kim, the girls and their mothers

What’s gone wrong?

She’s three and she sticks her tummy out proudly. She’s thirteen and she sucks her tummy in shamefully. What goes wrong?

She climbs a tree to play at being a spy.
She sits in her room posting selfies to be liked. What goes wrong?

She says, “No! Stop it!” to the little boy who snatches her toy.
She says nothing to the teenage boyfriend who takes it a bit far.
What goes wrong?

Be part of the solution

We need women to help girls emerge from adolescence as strong as they went in. Learn to facilitate Girls Journeying Together groups supporting girls safely into their teens.

Demand is growing — we need more facilitators!

Girls are suffering. Many girls are feeling the pressure to do well at school, look good, stay connected on social media, get on with their parents, and fit in with their peers. Sadly, and especially since the pandemic, many girls are showing the signs of not coping and mental health concerns are on the rise.

Would you like to be able to support girls through this challenging phase?

Rites for Girls facilitator training gives you the skills and knowledge to guide girls on their transformative journey to womanhood by delivering year-long Girls Journeying Together groups as part of a professional association.

You can help preteen and teen girls to:

  • Claim her self-worth with confidence
  • Speak her truth
  • Have good friends and to be a good friend
  • Tune into her inner compass – her deepest, truest self
  • Understand, honour, and care for her changing body

Girls Journeying Together groups help girls enter their teens feeling self-assured and supported. We meet monthly for a year and the girls make friends for life.

Frequently asked questions

This training will change you. It will change you as a woman and also, if you are one, as a mother. You will become the woman that the twelve-year-old-you needed.

You will learn how to facilitate small groups of pre-teen girls, meeting monthly for a year, as they practice being true to themselves, learn about puberty, share their hopes and fears, and help each other into their teens.

This work is preventative, keeping girls free of many of the mental health issues that are so prevalent amongst teens today. You can guide girls through adolescence, reducing some of the pressures and helping them to emerge into adulthood as strong, sure, capable young women.

This professional training is an investment in your career. Provided you meet the course requirements you will qualify as an accredited Girls Journeying Together group facilitator. You will then be eligible to join the Rites for Girls Association which will promote and support you to run these groups.

Running Girls Journeying Together groups provides you with really meaningful employment. You will touch deeply the lives of the girls that you work with.

Mental health concerns for girls are increasing. Girls need our support and mothers want to give their daughters the opportunity of belonging to a Girls Journeying Together group.

Steve Biddulph has recognised the importance of the work being done by Rites for Girls in his most recent bestselling books ‘10 Things Girls Need Most’ which has a section written by Kim and ‘Raising Girls’. Kim’s talks and her book ‘From Daughter to Woman, parenting girls safely through their teens’ is also increasing awareness of the need for the support that Girls Journeying Together provides. We are receiving requests from all over the world for Girls Journeying Together groups so we need more facilitators.

The training lasts twenty months which includes three residential group training modules over eight months followed by twelve months supervised practise running your own Girls Journeying Together group, individual support, peer groups and written work. Each residential module will cover topics directly related to the Rites for Girls programme and will ask you to reflect upon your own experiences at that pre-teen stage of your life. We will be journeying together as women, mirroring the journey that you will be learning to facilitate for the girls. This means that two processes will go on simultaneously during the training: in the mornings you will experience a session of Girls Journeying Together group as an 11 year old girl; and in the afternoons there will be processing, teaching, and experiential exercises to support your own individual process as a professional adult woman working with girls of this age.

In addition to the three residential training modules you will have individual coaching with either Helena or Kim and you will be allocated a peer group for support throughout the training. After the final residential (about 9 months into the course) you will also receive monthly on-line coaching in small groups with Kim or Helena to support you in facilitating your own Girls Journeying Together group.

There will be written and practical assignments to complete in between all three training modules (2000-2500 words) and a final qualifying paper (7500-10,000 words) to complete before graduation. Once you’re running your first group you’ll be expected to present a short monthly written paper of 1000-1500 words to track your progress and share the joys and struggles you encounter on the way.

Please note: If you have a fear of written work, please don’t let that stop you from joining us. We’re not demanding academic papers nor do you need a talent for writing; the written assignments are partly to help us to see how we can better support you in your progress, and partly to help ground and integrate your learning for yourself.

We’re interested to hear what is calling you to this work. We are flexible about our entry requirements as long as you bring some relevant skills and experience. You may have group work experience, counselling or therapy qualifications, teaching or youth work skills, and daughters of your own (but we don’t require you to have all of these).

Kim developed Girls Journeying Together groups alongside home-educating three children. If you do have children it helps you become a better informed parent and, once you’re qualified, this work balances really well with raising a family or other commitments. All you need is someone who can look after your children for three hours on the days that you run the group; everything else, the admin and planning, can fit around family life.

Understandably many women are challenged by the idea of leaving their children for the residential training modules. Our current apprentices have had to call on the support of family and friends and have been amazed at the unexpected benefits to all on discovering that the family can manage without them!

Your first year of running a Girls Journeying Together group, closely supervised by us, will be your most intense part of the training. Expect your organisation time to be greatest in this first year as you prepare to run each session for the first time.

On completing all three residential modules of the Rites for Girls Facilitator Training programme you may be ready to run your first group, with us providing close monthly supervision. On successful completion of all the training requirements and when you finish running your first year-long group you will become an accredited Rites for Girls facilitator qualified to run Girls Journeying Together groups.

We give you all the training, materials, and support needed to run your first group. We help you publicise it and set it up and we’ll give you mini-group supervision every month. We want you to have everything you need to be able enjoy this work and we’re committed to making sure that everyone in a Girls Journeying Together group has a top quality experience.
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That’s fine, there’s no hurry. You can start when you’re ready. You’ll still participate in the group supervisions and learn from your peers who do start running their own groups.

Once you’re accredited you can charge £35 per girl per month, so with a group of 12 girls that’s £385 per month or £4,620 per annum per group (having paid your £35pm license fee). If you ran four groups a month you would earn £18,480pa.

We also want to reach girls from less affluent families and we’re aware that some of you will want to offer girls’ groups to less advantaged girls so we have plans for a bursary fund to subsidise their membership of your groups.

Initially, when you run your first supervised group as part of your training, we suggest a maximum of ten girls charging them no more than £20 each, potentially earning you £2,400pa.

Aside from your investment in your training there are minimal costs in establishing yourself as a Girls Journeying Together facilitator. Within one year of being qualified to run girls’ groups you can recoup what you paid to train and set up.

  • You will be listed on the Rites for Girls website as an accredited facilitator licensed to run Girls Journeying Together groups
  • Your groups will be advertised on the website together with your profile and email
  • You will be licensed to use the Rites for Girls logo, kit of promotional materials, and training materials
  • You will have access to our Rites for Girls supervisors to support you in your work
  • You can join our on-line support network of Girls Journeying Together facilitators
  • You will be eligible for further training so you can learn how to continue your work with the girls as they progress through their teens
  • You will benefit from our organisational membership of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

Normal membership fees will be £120 per annum to cover website administration to promote your Girls Journeying Together groups and our organisational membership of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).

In addition you will be asked for the monthly license fee of £35 for each group you run. Your fee will be used to develop the work of the Rites for Girls Association and create a bursary fund for less privileged girls. We are not driven by financial ambition; our mission is to widen our reach and bring the benefits of our groups to more girls.

Although not ideal, in exceptional cases you could make up what you miss by paying for individual tutorials.

Absolutely. As soon as women attend one of our training taster days they understand why this is necessary. The training is intense and covers a lot in a short space of time. You will need to revisit your own pre-teen years in addition to learning how to deliver the Girls Journeying Together programme. The girls’ groups are different every time, so you will need to acquire the skills to be responsive to the needs of each group of girls and have many tools at your disposal so you can adapt to what they bring to each month’s meeting.

Engaging in the dual process that this training requires will be demanding but rewarding work. Facilitating a Girls Journeying Together group can seem deceptively simple to the untrained and inexperienced. In reality, this simple appearance is rooted in a complexity of psychotherapeutic skills and personal psychological competences — hence the length and the format of this training. Just as the girls attending the groups experience themselves changed by the end of the year, so you also will experience yourself and each other differently by the end of this training. Expect to emerge as the women the young girl inside you was waiting for!

We understand that for many women leaving your children presents a challenge. Running Girls Journeying Together groups can fit well alongside family life but to attend the training will require the support of your family and friends. Previous apprentice facilitators report unexpected benefits to having sorted out this important part of being able to commit to the training.

We appreciate that this professional training requires significant commitment from you in time and money. We’re dedicated to ensuring every Rites for Girls facilitator is capable of providing a high quality of delivery for her girls. Working at this level with adolescent girls requires in-depth training and we strongly encourage you to come along to a training taster day or sign up for a live chat session to help you appreciate what is involved.

We want to make this as accessible as possible so we have designed the course to enable you to begin earning halfway through your training. You have the potential to have earned back the training fees within a year of qualifying. If you feel called to this work then be creative in finding a way to finance your dream.

We encourage you to use your head to follow your heart.

Engaging in the dual process that this training requires will be demanding but rewarding work. Facilitating a Girls Journeying Together group can seem deceptively simple to the untrained and inexperienced. In reality, this simple appearance is rooted in a complexity of psychotherapeutic skills and personal psychological competences — hence the length and the format of this training. Just as the girls attending the groups experience themselves changed by the end of the year, so you also will experience yourself and each other differently by the end of this training. Expect to emerge as the women the young girl inside you was waiting for!

We understand that for many women leaving your children presents a challenge. Running Girls Journeying Together groups can fit well alongside family life but to attend the training will require the support of your family and friends. Previous apprentice facilitators report unexpected benefits to having sorted out this important part of being able to commit to the training.

Kim McCabe

Kim McCabe is the Founder Director of Rites for Girls since 2011 and is a home-educating mother of three. As originator and facilitator of Girls Journeying Together programmes, she offers year-long groups for girls with simultaneous support for their mothers. She studied child psychology at Cambridge University, was a counsellor to distressed teenagers, and taught sex education in schools and youth groups. She also trained as an assertiveness trainer, a 5Rhythms shamanic dance teacher, and a business management consultant. After thirty years of researching and working with young people, Kim has found a way to support preteen girls healthily through adolescence and is author of ‘From Daughter to Woman, parenting girls safely through their teens’ published by Robinson Publishing in 2018.

Helena Løvendal

Helena Løvendal was born in Denmark in 1958. She has worked in private practice in London, UK, since 1988, is co-founder and Director of The Centre For Gender Psychology & Creative Couple Work, and originator of ‘Ways of Woman’ inner leadership programs which she has led since 1993. Helena offers psychotherapy, coaching, and workshops for individuals and couples, as well as specialist training and supervision for professionals in the field of relationship and sex and gender relations in the UK, Scandinavia, Russia, and mainland Europe. One of the first qualified Sexual Grounding Therapists®, she is a SGT Senior Trainer and has been Head of Education SGT International since May 2013. Her first book ‘Sex, Love and the Dangers of Intimacy – a Guide to Passionate Relationships when the “Honeymoon” is over’, published by HarperCollins in 2002, was re-published in 2010 by Lone Arrow Press.
www.helena-lovendal.com

Limited places

Terms and conditions – DOWNLOAD HERE the Terms and Conditions for GJT groups and Facilitator Training.

Terms and conditions
DOWNLOAD HERE the Terms and Conditions for GJT groups and Facilitator Training.