FAST AND FEMALE IS LOOKING TO RAISE $15,000 THIS MARCH TO SUPPORT OUR ROLE MODEL AND YOUTH PROGRAM.

Throughout the month of March, we will be hosting various events and initiatives to celebrate our women role models in sport, and support us in reaching our fundraising goal. These events and initiatives will include the following:

Stay tuned for more details on our March activities and what else is to come!

Fast and Female Supporting Women in Sport Foundation aims to be as transparent with our community as possible moving forward. To do that, we are sharing our key priorities on where your donation will go:

• Invest and grow our National Youth Advisory Program, including expanding our program offerings for youth ages 15-21 to invest in our leaders of tomorrow.
• Prioritize our National Role Model Program, so that we can connect more self-identified girls with REAL (relatable, empowered, active leaders) Role Models from within their communities. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it, and we aim to continue to evolve a network of diverse role models to mentor and shape the leaders of tomorrow. This includes implementing more training for our Role Models, launching our Role Model portal, and solidifying our recruitment and onboarding process.

We know that you can’t be what you can’t see, and the value of having relatable role models. Here’s some evidence to back that up:

• Watching others succeed allows one to think, “If others can do it, I should be able to achieve it too.” (Bandura, A. 1977)
• “The more a [role] model and [a participant] are similar, the more likely that the model’s behaviour is considered relevant and worthy of imitation.” (Meier, M. 2015)
• Having role models with similar characteristics to F&F participants will facilitate relatability. It is important that F&F role models are representative of diverse racial, ethnic and religious identities and abilities. (Bandura, A. 1977)

In 2020, Fast and Female underwent a Program Evaluation with Dr. Catherine Sabiston of the University of Toronto. Dr. Sabiston shared the following recommendation when it came to our role model program:

• Consider an emphasis on having active and/or authentic role models, rather than athletic role models
• Emphasize the relatability of F&F’s role models over elite athlete status (as the literature suggests that girls tend to have a preference for role models who are like them and who do other things alongside sport)
• Explore options for including or recruiting role models who are leaders in their community and who find ways to be physically active (without necessarily engaging in sport at an elite level)
• Include role models that represent a diversity of appearances and abilities, to ensure that as manyparticipants as possible feel that F&F’s chosen role models are similar to them