Empowering Young Women: Canterbury League Club Donates to Support Lakemba Girls Jujitsu Squad

Canterbury League Club has generously donated $10,000 to Artemis Society to help continue their important work with their Lakemba Girls Jujitsu Squad.
Artemis Society focus on working with culturally and linguistically diverse girls and women from extremely conservative backgrounds in the Canterbury-Bankstown region. Artemis Society created the Lakemba Girls Jujitsu Squad project to provide opportunities for social, emotional and physical development for girls who are often don’t have access to outside activities or have the means to afford them.
The Lakemba Girls Jujitsu Squad encourages more girls from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to get involved in sport, and in particular self defence. Learning self defence opens up so many new opportunities for the girls, and helps them feel safer and more confident.
“The biggest impact on the girls has been seeing so many of them take up leadership positions across a variety of different areas in their lives, and every year our then year 12 cohort is always getting early entry offers for univerisity based on their athletic success at competitions,” said Sensai Rose Smith from Artemis Society.
Sensai Rose Smith further highlighted that “one of our biggest successes with our project was sending the squad to the World Cup last year, where our girls took world championship titles as well as silver and bronze medals – every girl scored which was amazing. The girls were presented with a parliamentary recognition certificate by the Honorable Jihad Dib.”
Many of the young women have come from refugee and migrant backgrounds and have not been able to access many of the sports and social activities most young women of the same age take for granted. Artemis Society have created a safe and inclusive space where women and girls of Muslim faith are able to train, participate in sports events. Their programs provide confidence and self-esteem building and development of physical fitness and healthy life choices.
Sensei Rose Smith emphasised how she feels “learning a martial art fundamentally changes the way a girl feels about herself – and I wanted to target young muslim women specifically who could really benefit from learning self defence as well as young women from refugee backgrounds who may be dealing with trauma.”
“Thanks to the kind donation of the Canterbury League Club, we hope to get more girls and women training in jujitsu and discovering the many benefits,” said Sensei Rose Smith. “We also hope to grow our numbers and get a venue that is a bit closer to the centre of Bankstown so that more families can access our programs.”