+SocialGood Connector Drives Women’s Empowerment Through Mentorship
By +SocialGood Connector, Priyanka Jaisinghani
On the right-hand corner of my laptop screen, the date flashed March 29, 2017. I was a few minutes early to my video call, eagerly awaiting to connect with my mentee. This was going to be our first call, and I couldn’t wait to learn more about her and how I could best support her. I was part of the inaugural Girlz, FTW cohort, a mentorship program connecting bold, authentic women from around the world for mutual empowerment.
I was based in New York, and my mentee was based in Florida. We both came from different backgrounds, industries, and walks of life, as did the rest of the girls in our program, and that made this experience so much more enriching.
Growing up across different cultures and countries — India, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the United States — equipped me with a global mindset from an early age. By the time I was 16, I witnessed contradictions all around me: India’s booming economy that struggled with poverty, Mexico’s developing economy that struggled with drugs, and the UAE’s rich and comfortable society that struggled with women’s equality. Throughout all my travels, I’ve witnessed that irrespective of geography, girls face similar issues worldwide, and continue to remain on unequal footing — and that’s something that needs to change.
While women are more empowered in the year 2020 — with more girls going to school, more women in leadership positions, and a growing global spotlight on the gender equality conversation — we are still further behind from where we need to be. In 2017, instead of waiting for things to change, I worked with fellow young Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) champions, Nicol Perez andAmanda Arevalo, to take things into our own hands and launched Girlz, FTW.. A week before International Women’s Day in 2017, we designed a website, asked our most inspiring friends to become mentors, created a curriculum, and launched applications for mentees — all in seven days.
When we first launched, we had a cohort of 16 girls. Today, our community has supported over 2,000 girls from over 73 different countries, includingNigeria, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, India, Philippines, Argentina, Jamaica, Canada, Morocco, and the United Kingdom. From the thousands of applications we receive, there’s a common thread that weaves them all together: they’re driven to build a better world for women.
But why does mentorship matter? Mentorship, whether as a mentor or as a mentee, has the ability to open doors. We believe that education and mentorship provide immeasurable access to resources that cannot be found in everyday institutions. Within our own mentorship program, we strive to provide girls with the motivation, confidence, and an extended community of women to gain new skills. Over the past three years, we’ve been able to organize inspirational conversations with women such as the United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, Jayathma Wickramanayake, United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up Executive Director Melissa Kilby, musician and activist Madame Gandhi, and more. We’ve also hosted global summits and supported girls’ dreams through our storytelling program, which helps empower the next generation of female writers, storytellers and journalists.
We believe that you can’t become what you can’t see, and we’re widening the possibilities of what women can become. Our program matches mentors and mentees across different regions to facilitate learning about different cultures, obstacles that girls face in diverse regions, and identify new ways to tackle common problems. We’re strengthening the visibility and collective voices of girls on a global scale.
When you ask the question “what does mentorship mean to you,” you’ll find varying answers. For us, mentorship allows us to build a community of women who are driven to support and empower each other. As we continue to look at news headlines from around the world, we know there’s a lot more work ahead of us to build a more equal world for women. So, with our heads held high and a deep sense of urgency, we’re marching towards the future we want.
Do you want to get involved? Join us as a mentor or mentee: https://www.girlzftw.com/apply
