The Coalition on Urban Girls (CUG) advances girls’ health, safety, and quality of life through research, advocacy, policy, and cross-sector collaboration. Its signature initiative, the Quality of Life Plan (QLP) for Urban Girls is developing Chicago’s first girl-centered quality of life plan by bringing together girls, community organizations, researchers, practitioners, public agencies, and philanthropy to co-design coordinated strategies that improve the conditions where girls live, learn, work, and play.
Chicago is home to nearly 300,000 girls, yet the systems intended to support them, including education, healthcare, housing, youth development, and public safety, too often operate independently rather than in partnership. As a result, opportunities to improve girls’ quality of life are frequently fragmented rather than coordinated. CUG recognized this gap through years of research and community engagement. Building on the Sinai Urban Health Institute’s Empower Your Voice study and CUG’s landmark white paper Are the Girls Well? (CUG) launched a citywide prioritization phase to ensure that girls, not organizations, identified the issues that mattered most. Over the past year, CUG engaged 611 girls (ages 11–19) from neighborhoods across Chicago to identify the priorities they believe will have the greatest impact on their quality of life. Informed by local and national data and guided by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a supporting framework, this work now reflects the voices of more than 2,280 girls, creating one of Chicago’s most comprehensive community-informed datasets on girls’ lived experiences and establishing a clear, girl-defined agenda for action.
Girls’ priorities revealed that quality of life cannot be improved through isolated programs alone. Instead, they identified interconnected conditions such as mental health, safety, healthcare access, educational opportunity, housing stability, and leadership—all of which require coordinated, cross-sector solutions. While Chicago has a long history of community-driven quality of life plans that have leveraged more than $900 million in neighborhood investment, none have been designed specifically with and for girls. CUG is pioneering a new application of the quality of life plan model by adapting it to focus on a specific population, creating a human-centered framework that has the potential to inform communities nationwide.
The Girls Opportunity Alliance Fund will help launch and activate six collaborative, human-centered communities of practice labs that will transform girls’ priorities into Chicago’s first Quality of Life Plan for Girls. Guided by trained navigators and grounded in human-centered design, each lab will steward one Quality of Life Plan condition while engaging girls as leaders and co-designers throughout the process. The initiative will document this pioneering methodology in real time, creating a replicable framework for aligning research, policy, funding, and practice around girls’ priorities. By strengthening the infrastructure for girl-centered leadership and coordinated systems change, this investment will benefit tens of thousands of girls across Chicago while providing a model for communities across the country.
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