About Us

HARMONY GARDEN is a nonprofit (501(c) 3 status) center for community research established to address the individual and societal factors affecting the health, wellbeing and safety of girls and families in our community.

The long-term goal of HARMONY GARDEN is to create a collective community vision and action plan to achieve and sustain the physical, social, and emotional health of our region's girls from birth through adolescence and to eliminate disparities that exist for urban and rural girls.

Concerns about the health and wellbeing of Greater Cincinnati's girls and women was precipitated in 2005 with the release of Pulse:  A Study on the Status of Women and Girls by The Women's Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation.  Lisa Mills and Kathleen Burklow, the co-founders of HARMONY GARDEN, were the lead investigators of the Pulse workgroup to design and implement a strategic plan to determine the status of girls in the 8-county Greater Cincinnati region.  Pulse revealed significant and alarming gaps within educational, health and social domains for girls residing in Cincinnati's urban core where the population is predominantly comprised of African-American girls.  These girls exhibited lower high school graduation rates (66.6%) compared to the national average (70%), lower 6th grade reading proficiency rates (54%) compared to girls in surrounding metropolitan counties (79%), and higher rates of teen births that exceeded the national teen birth rate.  Pulse also revealed that the poverty rate (65.5%) of female-headed households with children was extremely high and far exceeded the nation's poverty rate of 27% for female-headed families.  Thus, Pulse findings showed unequivocally that African-American girls and women living in the urban core of Cincinnati had poor outcomes and were most in need of positive social change.

The Pulse study culminated in a call to action to improve outcomes for girls and women living in our region, including the need to "grow strong girls."  Consistent with the growing recognition of the need to better understand the health status of girls and young women in the region and alarmed by the disparities revealed by the Pulse report, Mills and Burklow opened HARMONY GARDEN in September of 2006 in response to this call to action.

Pulse:  A Study on the Status of Women and Girls