The Wahine Project
The Wahine Project is a non-profit based in Monterey Bay, California which seeks to facilitate empowerment and stewardship through surfing workshops.[1]
Founding
In 2010, at the age of thirty-eight, Dionne Ybarra tried surfing for the first time and loved it. She grew up in Salinas, an agricultural hub 20 miles east of Monterey. Her parents were farm workers who immigrated from Mexico. She grew up with little exposure to the ocean and was hesitant to try surfing for a while. When she did, she realized how male-dominated the sport was: there were few women, and even fewer women of color in the water.[1]
She went on a surfing trip to Mexico with a friend and when she returned, she felt inspired to create a non-profit that would empower women and girls to connect with the ocean, each other, and themselves through surfing. She named it The Wahine Project because "wahine" means "girl" in Hawaiian.[1]
International connections
Shortly after getting workshops in Monterey started, Ybarra connected with a group of four girls surfing in the Gaza Strip. Living in a conservative culture, the girls had been told that if they tried to swim they would drown, by nature of their gender, but they surfed anyway. Ybarra facilitated the connection between them and a group of young girls in Monterey and they sent packages and letters back and forth. At this time, the Wahine Project's motto was "surfing globally, responding locally".[1]
Around the same time, Yaya Guerrero started surfing in Cuba and was interested in setting up a program similar to the Wahine Project to introduce other Cuban women to surfing. Ybarra and some other Californians involved in the Wahine Project went to Cuba and modeled how they run the workshops in Monterey, helping Guerrero launch her own program.[1]
Ybarra also connected with women attempting to start female-empowerment surfing groups in the Philippines and Peru, helping them get their programs started. Due to shifts in her personal life, Ybarra decided to relocalize the Wahine Project and solely focus on the Monterey chapter about eight years ago, and the international outposts are now operating independently.[1]
Current programming
The Wahine Project has expanded programming to include people of all genders and they now have co-ed and gendered programming. They now offer camps for kids ages four and up, lessons and team-building workshops for adults, and surf trips to Mexico.[1]
They also opened a store near Monterey called West End Refill which sells both surf gear and sustainable refill materials. The revenue from this store helps them give scholarships for their programs, advancing the goal of making surfing accessible to marginalized communities. Since their founding, they have given over $300,000 in scholarship money.[1]
Sources
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