Introduction: Finding Your Fearless!
Based in the United Kingdom, the Fearless Girls Club was founded to address a growing challenge facing young girls during the later years of primary school. Research has shown that girls aged 8 to 11 often experience significant declines in confidence, self-esteem, and resilience, alongside increasing social pressures and concerns around mental wellbeing. According to Girlguiding’s 2023 Girls’ Attitudes Survey, girls’ happiness has fallen to its lowest level in 15 years, highlighting the urgent need for supportive environments that help girls navigate the transition from childhood to adolescence.
Recognising these challenges, founders Elle Wilks and Kate Cooper identified a gap in both their local community and the wider UK landscape. While many activities and clubs exist for young people, few are specifically designed to help girls develop confidence, resilience, self-belief, and a strong sense of identity during these formative years. Their own research with parents of girls aged 8 to 11 revealed overwhelming demand for a dedicated space where girls could build friendships, explore their emotions, develop life skills, and prepare for the transition to secondary school.
The Fearless Girls Club encourages young girls to discover their inner courage, find their voice, and reach their full potential. Through a supportive and engaging environment, the organisation helps girls build confidence, develop meaningful connections, embrace challenges, and cultivate the resilience needed to thrive in an increasingly complex world.
The club was also founded in response to a broader cultural issue. Many traditional girls’ programmes have focused heavily on kindness as a core objective. While kindness remains an important value, it has often been associated with compliance, gentleness, and acquiescence. The Fearless Girls Club champions a different approach, one that encourages girls to be bold, assertive, self-assured, and compassionate, while remaining true to themselves.
Guided by its mission to help every girl “Find Your Fearless”, the organisation provides a safe, inclusive, and inspiring space where girls can be heard, feel seen, and discover what they are truly capable of.
In our interview with Elle Wilks, Co-Founder and Director, we explore how the Fearless Girls Club is empowering the next generation of girls to build confidence, form meaningful connections, embrace challenges, and flourish both personally and socially.
Q&A: Getting to know the Fearless Girls Club from Elle Wilks
1. What inspired the establishment of Fearless Girls Club, and what core mission drives the organization today?
Fearless Girls Club was born from a growing concern about what girls are navigating at increasingly young ages: pressure to fit in, anxiety, friendship challenges, perfectionism, body image worries, digital influence, and a worrying decline in confidence and wellbeing.
We felt there was a real gap between what girls need and what many existing extracurricular spaces offer. Plenty of activities build skills or focus on achievement, but fewer are intentionally designed around emotional well-being, resilience, and self-belief.
Our mission is simple: to help girls aged 8–12 build the confidence, resilience, and life skills they need to navigate the world with courage and self-trust. We want girls to know who they are, trust their voice, and feel equipped to handle challenges, not by becoming fearless in the literal sense, but by learning how to move forward even when things feel uncertain or uncomfortable.
2. How would the long-term vision for Fearless Girls Club be described, and what impact is it intended to create for young girls?
Our long-term vision is to make high-quality confidence and well-being support accessible to girls far beyond our local community.
At the moment, we do this through our after-school clubs, workshops, and subscription boxes, but the bigger ambition is national reach and meaningful early intervention.
If we can support girls before confidence has significantly eroded, before limiting beliefs become deeply embedded, and before anxiety becomes the dominant lens through which they see themselves, that matters.
The impact we want is both immediate and long-term: girls who feel more confident speaking up, trying new things, managing setbacks, and building healthy relationships, as well as future women who carry a stronger sense of self into adulthood.
3. What are the key challenges affecting girls’ confidence and wellbeing today, and how does the organisation aim to address them?
There isn’t one single issue. It’s cumulative pressure.
Girls are absorbing messages from peers, social media, school environments, wider culture, and increasingly adult-like expectations at younger ages. Many are highly self-aware, but not yet equipped with the emotional tools to process what they’re feeling.
We’re also seeing a tendency for girls to become risk-averse, overly perfectionistic, and reluctant to make mistakes, which can quietly undermine confidence over time.
Fearless Girls Club addresses this through practical, preventative support rather than crisis intervention. Everything we create is designed to help girls understand themselves better, practise emotional regulation, develop resilience, strengthen friendships, and build confidence through action.
Our approach blends fun, creativity, and community with evidence-informed tools drawn from psychology and child development, because girls engage best when support feels empowering rather than clinical.
4. Does Fearless Girls Club draw on principles of positive psychology, and if so, how are these reflected in its programmes and activities?
Yes, although we don’t position ourselves as a formal positive psychology programme.
There is a clear overlap in many areas, particularly around strengths, optimism, resilience, emotional literacy, belonging, confidence-building, and helping girls recognise their own agency.
Our programmes are designed to help girls notice what’s going well as well as what feels difficult, celebrate progress, build meaningful peer connections, and develop practical strategies for navigating challenges.
We draw from a broader evidence base, too, including child development, wellbeing research, emotional regulation strategies, and confidence-building approaches that are developmentally appropriate for this age group.
Our focus is always on what works for real girls in real life.
5. Looking ahead, what future developments or priorities are planned for Fearless Girls Club?
Our immediate priority is reaching more girls in sustainable ways.
As a social enterprise, we’re constantly balancing impact with accessibility, so we’re exploring how to scale our reach without losing the quality, warmth and intentionality that define the experience.
That includes growing awareness of our subscription boxes nationally, expanding workshop opportunities, deepening partnerships, and exploring models that could allow Fearless Girls Club to reach more communities across the UK.
We’re also continuing to strengthen our evidence base, because measuring impact properly matters to us. We want the work we do to be not just well-loved, but demonstrably effective.
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Key Insights: How the Fearless Girls Club Reflects the Principles of Positive Psychology
To further understand the impact of Fearless Girls Club’s approach, the following analysis maps its mission and activities against established principles of positive psychology, particularly the PERMA model of wellbeing.
Although Fearless Girls Club does not describe itself as a formal positive psychology programme, Elle Wilks acknowledged that its work closely aligns with many evidence-based wellbeing principles, particularly those relating to strengths, optimism, resilience, emotional literacy, belonging, and confidence-building. These themes correspond strongly with the PERMA framework developed by Seligman, which identifies five key components of wellbeing: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (University of Pennsylvania, 2024; Madeson, 2017).
Positive Emotion
Positive emotion refers to experiences such as hope, joy, pride, gratitude, and optimism. During the interview, Wilks highlighted the growing pressures faced by young girls, including anxiety, perfectionism, friendship difficulties, and declining confidence. Fearless Girls Club seeks to counter these challenges by creating a supportive environment where girls can recognise their strengths, celebrate progress, and develop self-belief. By helping girls focus on what is going well alongside what feels difficult, the club encourages a more optimistic outlook.
Engagement
Engagement occurs when individuals become fully involved in activities that challenge and develop their skills. Fearless Girls Club provides opportunities for girls to actively participate in workshops, after-school clubs, and interactive learning experiences that promote critical thinking, creativity, and self-discovery. Rather than passively receiving advice, girls are encouraged to practise new skills, explore their interests, and build confidence through meaningful participation.
Relationships
Strong social connections are fundamental to wellbeing. One of the core objectives of Fearless Girls Club is to create a safe and inclusive community where girls feel heard, valued, and understood. Through shared experiences, girls develop friendships, strengthen communication skills, and gain a sense of belonging. As Wilks noted, many girls are navigating complex social pressures without the emotional tools to process them effectively. The club addresses this by fostering supportive peer relationships and encouraging healthy connections with both others and themselves.
Meaning and Mattering
Meaning involves feeling connected to something larger than oneself and believing that one’s life has value and purpose. Fearless Girls Club promotes this through its mission of helping girls discover their voice, trust themselves, and understand what they are capable of achieving. The organisation’s philosophy, embodied in its “Find Your Fearless” message, encourages girls to recognise that their thoughts, feelings, and aspirations matter. This emphasis on personal agency helps girls develop a stronger sense of identity and purpose during a critical stage of development.
Accomplishment
Accomplishment refers to working towards goals, overcoming obstacles, and experiencing a sense of achievement. Wilks emphasised that the club’s aim is not to eliminate fear but to help girls move forward despite uncertainty and discomfort. Through resilience-building activities, confidence development, and opportunities to try new things, girls learn that setbacks are part of growth rather than signs of failure. These experiences cultivate perseverance, self-efficacy, and a sense of accomplishment that can extend well beyond childhood.
Conclusion
The interview with Elle Wilks demonstrates that Fearless Girls Club is addressing many of the factors that contribute to declining confidence and wellbeing among young girls. By fostering positive emotions, active engagement, meaningful relationships, purpose, and achievement, the organisation reflects several of the core principles of positive psychology. Its focus on early intervention, emotional wellbeing and confidence-building offers a practical example of how wellbeing science can be translated into real-world programmes that support girls during a pivotal stage of their development.
Ultimately, initiatives like Fearless Girls Club play a vital role in shaping a more confident, resilient generation of young girls, and we wish Elle Wilks and the team every success as they continue to grow their impact across the UK
References
- Fearless Girls Club CIC. (2026). Fearless Girls Club. https://www.fearlessgirlsclub.co.uk/
- Madeson, M. (2017). Seligman’s PERMA+ Model Explained: A Theory of Wellbeing.
- PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/perma-model/ . University of Pennsylvania. (2024). PERMATM Theory of Well-Being and PERMATM Workshops |
- Positive Psychology Center. University of Pennsylvania. https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/learn-more/perma-theory-well-being-and-perma-workshops
Note: This piece was curated and coordinated by Sheannelle Sarmiento and Radhika Narayan.