"Will you hold the needle like this?" asks volunteer instructor Alona Ruth, preparing to demonstrate. "You're going to thread it." 

The girls seize the task with determination, each one stabbing thread through a needle's eye. Next, they stitch strips of blue fabric into squishy hackeysack balls. 

These 9-, 10- and 11-year-olds believe there's nothing they can't do. Ask what they want to be when they grow up, and they say nurse, lawyer, teacher, singer and dancer, basketball player and veterinarian.

Yet these girls are also on the brink of a perplexing American phenomenon that puts them - even those of privilege and opportunity - at high risk for plummeting self-esteem and risky behaviors such as crime, sex and school dropout as they approach adolescence. 

That threat is accelerated in families with low income, a single parent or patterns of abuse and neglect. Such conditions are prevalent in the Dayton's Bluff community where these girls live, demographic data shows. The girls come to this after-school retreat because  it's "fun".

Raeann Ruth, who owns the house and lives across the street, fosters that appeal. But she opened its doors to girls for another reason: to help them form the strong sense of self they will need to buck the adolescent pressures that threaten girls' self -esteem. 

"They have the ambition," Ruth says of the grade-school girls. "How they will get there is another story. Will they get there? There's no reason why they shouldn't." 

A wife and the mother of two, Ruth calls the playfully decorated retreat house she and husband Steve opened in February "a neighborhood-based enrichment center." Its official name is the Portage for Youth, reflective of its intended safe route through a treacherous life transition. Its participants are students at Mounds Park All Nations Magnet School. 

In these girls' eager faces, Ruth sees the promise of  her young self. Though she grew up in a traditional family, with lessons from clari net to water ballet, she says one important piece was missing. She never believed in her own worth. 

Married and pregnant at 18, she fell into a risky and transient lifestyle that lasted 10 years and sometimes relegated her to living on the streets. 

Her journey to those "dark places" and back left her with a passion for reaching out to kids. Three years ago, she began leading canoe excursions for students. She initiated a venture in which kids created greeting cards to help pay for the trips. 

Then Ruth heard girls say that, when they turned 15, "they planned to get pregnant, get their own apartment and go on welfare. They were dead serious, and I was stunned. I thought, 'That's all you think you have in your f uture?' I thought, 'Someone has to tell these kids there is more to life than getting an apartment and having a baby.' 

"And that's when this idea hit me."

Don't marry too soon 

After and during a February open house, 15 girls signed up for her program of after-school activities. Participants are third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. 

The exceptions are Crystal Paulson, 13, and 16-year-old Heidi Ruth, Raeann Ruth's niece. These two teens, the Portage's "junior leaders," say they see some of their classmates' priorities changing. 

"Some of them are boy-crazy," says Crystal, a seventh-grader at Hazel Park Middle School. "Or all they care about is their hair," adds Heidi, a sophomore at Johnson High. 

On the Portage's weekly "free day," the teen duo directs as the younger girls form human pyra mids and play circle games amid bean-bag chairs that ring the living-room floor. 

Nine-year-old Hope Demarra spends part of "free day" playing with the house mascot, a Vietnamese potbellied pig named Libby. Though Hope has threatened to quit the program, as did her older sister and three other girls, she has so far stuck with it. 

Roanna Funmaker, 11, flits through the dining room wearing a beaded wedding veil, Usually the veil sits atop a mannequin in the adjacent sewing room, which is stocked with six working machines. "I'm getting married," Roanna teases. To which Ruth calls out, "Just remember not to get married too soon." 

While the others girls watch "Babe" on the house VCR, Nicole Egbufoama completes her math homework. She is an A student who wants to be a primatologist. Nicole, 10, is excited, she says, about being in the Portage's Girl Scout troop. 

Another option during free time at the Portage house is to retreat to its second story. An upstairs technology room offers three computers; another is designated for homework. 

Most girls at the Portage are American Indian, though Hispanic, African-American and white races are represented as well. The multicultural mix fits with Ruth's plan. As she recruits more volunteers to help with gardening, canning and "art in the alley," a studio she hopes to create in the garage, she hopes to add to the intergenerational mix as well. 

Participants here call it "the club." At Ruth's urging, they wrote their own rules. Then each girl signed a pledge to stick by them. 

Program is flowering 

Ruth says she maintains the house and program on "half a shoestring," works without pay and relies on relatives as volunteers in order to keep her dream alive. 

The project has long had the philosophical support of the District Four Community Council and other community leaders. But it took three years and 110 grant applications to acquire $24,500 from the city and the Grotto Foundation. Fund-raisers and friends have helped, but the Portage will need additional money to continue. 

Peg Thomas, the foundation's executive director, says the Portage is a pioneer in its grass-roots response to a social crisis. It is also a model in demonstrating how a community can help support its young women's self-esteem. 

"Often it is frustrating because services are not emerging from the needs of girls like this one is," Thomas says. "This one is really flowering." 

A 1993 study for the Grotto Foundation ties girls' low self-esteem to teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, crime, gang affiliations, school truancy and dropout and alcohol and drug use, as well as suicide.

Carolyn Penning, a science specialist at Mounds Park who helped steer some girls to the program, says she daily sees the need to help preserve girls' self-esteem. 

Some come from unstable homes, and she hears stories every day of verbal and sexual abuse. Her seventh-grade home room a couple of years ago included a girl who was pregnant. 

"These girls have ambitions and aspirations," Penning says. "But the odds are stacked against them. With the racial thing, with just being female. I would have to say this is going to offer them support and stability."