Career Girls Role Model Platform

“You can’t be what you can’t see.” Access to diverse, successful women role models is critical. 

Career Girls is a career exploration and readiness platform – that provides girls everywhere - online and offline - access to hundreds of diverse, accomplished women role models.

We focus on:

• The “see it” part – producing video interviews of women role models, and 

• The “how to be it” part – producing curriculum and programming for direct engagement of girls in virtual, hybrid, in-person, and remote settings.

Our award-winning website offers free access to:

• 16,000 videos from interviews with over 800 women role models

• Career quiz

• College and career info

• College advice videos

• Social and emotional learning

• And toolkits for educators, parents, mentors

We are leaders in innovative virtual programming including Artificial intelligence, Environmental Science, and Business Models and IPOs.

We are a scalable solution with proven impact that provides equality of opportunity for all.

As the challenge states, unfinished learning could represent a $10 trillion loss in lifetime earnings. The scale of this problem is global and our solution is global. Studies currently show that women earn .82 per $1 a man earns when comparing earnings across all women and men in the United States. This is because more women are in lower-paying industries filling 72% of lowest paying jobs and there are fewer women in senior roles, especially women of color who fill less than 5% of those roles in S&P 500 companies. Millions of educated girls means more working women with the potential to add up to $12 trillion USD to global growth and thus, increasing lifetime earnings. 

We are trying to solve two key root causes:

1) The lack of access to diverse women role models. This results in “the imagination gap” –  the difference between career choices girls think they have and the range of careers actually available. 

2) The lack of foundational skills and the knowledge about the steps needed to pursue those careers.

Career Girls a free career exploration and readiness platform featuring videos of hundreds of diverse and successful women role models. The platform not only provides inspiration and insights, but offers tangible action steps and tools for girls to plan and prepare for their futures. It is available to parents, educators and learners for use online, offline and in hybrid settings.

At our core, we are a platform for role models to share knowledge with the next generation of girls. Our founding principles are diversity, inclusion and equality of opportunity for all. We don’t tell girls what to think, we let them hear directly from role models. 

Our three main offerings are:

• Video interviews of women role models

• Curriculum and activities for parents, educators, and learners

• Virtual and in-person programs where girls engage directly with role models

With free access to our innovative programming and award-winning website, we engage girls who would otherwise not have access to role models - especially role models they identify with. Offline access is provided through World Possible’s RACHEL portable hotspot including their OER2Go portal and Learning Equality’s Kolibri App.

Our target population is all girls ages 10 to 13, with a special focus on girls of color and girls facing economic inequalities. We selected this age group based on research from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). In their study, “Why So Few”, this is a crucial time for girls to learn from women role models. If they see women they identify with, they are much more likely to stay on track academically. Their subsequent academic success helps to level the playing field with boys and keeps them from falling behind.

We conduct focus groups and implement pilot projects to test and iterate our programming to understand and meet the needs of the girls we serve. We partner with girl-led advisory groups including the National Girls Collaborative Project Girls Advisory Board. We gain additional insights from our role models, school counselor advisory board, curriculum experts, teachers, and other youth development experts. 

As an international platform, we currently include hundreds of role models from around the world, including 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. As we scale, we will continue to interview inspiring women from all over the globe so that every girl, no matter her background, will be able to find women that she can relate to, learn from and begin to imagine her future. 

Learning environments must be re-imagined to support young learners to develop the skills and competencies they’ll need to thrive in the 21st century. Proven interventions including early career exploration and readiness programs must be adapted and scaled to benefit the most underserved.

Offering free access to innovative virtual camps, our award-winning website, and in-person events and programs, Career Girls is a proven technology-based solution that increases the engagement of girls in remote, hybrid, and physical learning environments. Centered on diversity and inclusion, we ensure equitable learning opportunities for all girls, with emphasis on BIPOC girls and girls facing economic inequalities.

Career Girls is currently in the scale stage as we have built out our robust platform and are looking to scale significantly. With 16,000+ videos from 800 role models, we have the expertise in identifying, interviewing, and sharing their stories. We have 10+ years experience in developing career preparation curriculum. With 200+ hours of virtual programming, we have launched virtual camps, career days, webinars, and town halls.  We have an expansive network of over 800 role models, 600 educators, 250 school counselors, 20 non-profit partnerships, and have served 10 million users. Now, we want to scale to include more countries, more languages and more users from around the world.

Career Girls is the only educational platform for girls that combines both the “see it” and the “how to be it” components for imagining their future.

The Career Girls solution is unique in that we combine the presentation of inspirational career role models with career and college preparation information. Inspiring videos from diverse and accomplished women represent hundreds of real-life careers. Role models share their career, education, and life stories to help a girl learn how to create her action plan for success. 

 We have seen our innovative programs become a catalyst for innovation with other youth-serving nonprofits. We are seen as leaders in this space and our virtual camps, for example, have been the inspiration for other programming by our partners and competitors. 

Our innovative approach creates a platform for diverse and successful women to scale their mentoring, advice, and hard-fought lessons learned to reach a global audience in perpetuity. This approach disrupts stereotypes. All girls, no matter their background, can learn from the individual and collective wisdom of role models from around the world.

Since our website went live in January 2011, we have had 10 million users from 232 countries and territories worldwide. Each year we have experienced significant growth in the number of visitors, page views, video views, and subscribers. 

 We are currently on pace to serve more than 3 million users to our website this year. We expect that to double to 6 million over the next year, and increase to 30 million highly engaged visitors in five years.

 Although in-person engagement with girls is on hold during the current COVID 19 pandemic, we served more than 1,000 girls over the last year through participation in virtual camps, webinars, and town halls. Reintroducing in-person, remote, and hybrid learning environments to our current offering should increase our direct program engagement to 10,000 over the next year and exceed 50,000 in five years. 

Independently, website users have downloaded 10,000 toolkits and curricula to support their own programming with girls over the last year. We anticipate this number to double to 20,000 next year and exceed 100,000 in five years. Each download has a multiplier effect, since most are designed with educators and group leaders in mind.

Impact Goal One: Expanded Reach 

We measure the reach of our impact by tracking these metrics:

• Number of girls, educators, and other stakeholders engaging with our online content

  • Curriculum and toolkit downloads

  • Website visits

  • Video views

• Number of girls participating in direct engagement programming

  • Virtual

  • Hybrid

  • In-person

  • Remote settings

Impact Goal Two: Improving Outcome Scores

After each direct engagement program with girls, we measure the quality of our impact through our measurement and evaluation tool we call the Imagination Index. The index consists of a weighted combination of indicators that provides a quantitative basis for assessing the impact of the Career Girls program on near-term outcomes of girls’ lives, across two dimensions: career and self. The career dimension measures career exploration and goals of girls. The self dimension measures their decision-making abilities, curiosity, and leadership potential.

Full-time staff - 2

Part-time staff - 1

Contractors - 5

I founded Career Girls to solve a pain point that was personal to me. As the first in my family to attend college I know that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Access to diverse, successful role models is critical. After attaining career success, I wanted to ensure that girls coming up behind me, especially girls like me - girls of color experiencing economic hardship -  to see diverse and accomplished women to close the imagination gap for what is possible in their lives. 

Our multicultural team has extensive experience and technical knowledge in video production, design, business strategy, communications, accounting, legal and curriculum development. We recently expanded our team with the hire of an Executive Director, Bree von Faith. Bree has 15+ years experience in nonprofit management and her leadership has resulted in the recruitment of over 600,000 new members, volunteers and donors for 8 organizations nationwide. 

Our Board of Directors and advisory team members reflect the diversity of the girls we serve and the careers of our role models. 

Most importantly, our entire team is driven by the motivation to make positive change in the world. Our leadership team’s collective work with women and girls’ organizations such as the Alliance for Girls, Starlight Africa, Black Girls Code, Girl Guides and Girl Scouts informs our programming ideas and provides us unique insights into designing and implementing our solution.

Diversity is in our DNA. Career Girls was created from my experiences as a Black girl. When I found my own personal success, I was determined to eliminate the barriers and limitations encountered by girls, especially BIPOC girls. As Career Girls grew, I was intentional in recruiting diverse women to fulfill our mission and to ensure our team has shared lived experiences with the girls we serve. At the Board level, our governance committee is committed to ensuring the leadership of the organization reflects the diverse audiences we serve. 

We disrupt stereotypes of who can be successful and we do that by creating an inclusive and equitable environment for our staff, Board, volunteers, role models and most importantly, girls.

We are applying to Solve because we understand the power that comes from partnerships and know that our work aligns with their goals. 

Two of the most important reasons we would like to be accepted into the Solve program are 1) to join the network of peers and impact-minded leaders, and 2) expanding our access to mentorship, coaching and strategic advice from experts.

These are specific ways how Solve can help us overcome barriers we face to scale our impact:

• Networking and strategies to develop:

  • implementing partnerships 

  • foundation partnerships and grant support 

  • corporate partners and program sponsorships

  • partnerships with educational institutions

• Strategic advice and expertise to develop topical programming along with monitoring and evaluation tools

• Media exposure from becoming a Solver team and participation at conferences

• Mentoring on developing our public relations strategy and our business model strategy

• Networking with teams and leaders to recruit diverse women as role models 

• Collaborating with Solver teams:

  • to customize content to reflect local customs and norms

  • for listening sessions with girl-led advisory groups and women-led organizations

For human capital, we need support as we continue to expand our board and our staff team to reflect the shared lived experiences of our learners and to expand our network of funders and partners. In addition, we need local implementing partners to support direct engagement programs with girls and to develop culturally relevant curricula.

For public relations, we need help ensuring that Career Girls is no longer the best kept secret. We could leverage expertise in press relations including development of a media kit, introductions to assignment line producers in news, educational and lifestyle networks, and getting our thought leadership to a wider audience. We also need partners who can help elevate the importance, and value, of role models for girls.

Partnerships would center on the development and distribution of our content for key stakeholders – educators, mentors, parents, and girls. There might also be opportunities for geographically or thematically based video production or the exploration of other formats. 

Solvers that are aligned to these partnership goals include Code Nation, TeachMobile by Eneza, Laboratoria, Girls Who Build, Digital Citizen Fund, Open Exchange Learning and Refactored.ai.

We would like to work with MIT faculty, such as Gita Rao - Finance Group at Sloan School of Management, who has partnered with us on our Financial Literacy camp and David Verrill - Initiative on the Digital Economy, who has partnered with us on hosting video shoots at MIT including sourcing role models and funding. 

These solver teams and faculty would advance our solution by providing insights into careers, access to diverse women role models and knowledge that would shape our curriculum. 

Career Girls is a digital solution that helps educators in primary and secondary school bring career exploration to girls in their classrooms - whether those “rooms” are online or in-person. We help girls close the imagination gap of what is possible for her career through access to diverse and accomplished role models. We do that by (1) producing video interviews of women role models leaders, and (2) producing empowerment lesson videos and corresponding curriculum from the insights of role models (i.e. Artificial Intelligence, Environmental Science Careers) that educators can use in a variety of ways. We also support first-generation college students with detailed course requirements.

We disrupt stereotypes of who can be successful by elevating diverse and accomplished role models. Girls need to see and learn from role models who they identify with. By providing access to these role models, we broaden the vision of what’s possible for girls in marginalized communities. According to Pew research, only 20% of educators are BIPOC. A John Hopkins study showed that the likelihood of college enrollment more than doubled (32%) for black students with at least two black teachers in elementary school. This increase in student outcomes shows the critical need for positive, authentic representation and role models. 

Role models are critical. Studies show that the number of girls interested in STEM and other careers doubles when they have role models (up to 41%). Girls with role models are 15% more likely to imagine themselves working in those careers.

We have shared the stories of several refugees and an Ethiopian role model who works in refugee camps. We would like to expand that to film more role models from refugee communities to share their experiences to foster resilience in girls around the world. Having completed three role model videos in Africa and Asia, we are experienced in setting up our productions in international locations and filming women from various backgrounds responding to our questions in their native languages. We have also been involved in Africa Code Week since 2017, which serves students in refugee camp settlements.

We are committed to making sure that the future workforce in robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning is diverse and inclusive. We have conducted 5-day virtual camps in partnership with industry experts as well as town halls to help girls learn about these careers and how to prepare for them.

Career Girls improves the quality of life for girls and women. For girls, our focus is on helping them learn from diverse and accomplished women role models so they can internalize that knowledge and identify their education and career path towards economic success. 

For women, storytelling is a proven method for building resilience. Role model interviews help women claim their authority, leadership and experiences. We elevate these stories so women’s voices can be celebrated. 

We would use this prize to advance our solution by filming more women role models and producing more video content to be shared globally in addition to testing new formats to elevate women’s voices.

We are strong proponents of preparing a diverse set of girls for careers in AI. We’ve already filmed over 25 women role models in AI careers and will be conducting a second virtual AI camp for girls this summer. We want to use proceeds from the AI for Humanity Prize to film additional women in AI and produce a broader series of virtual AI camps for girls.

We are strong proponents of preparing a diverse set of girls for careers in AI. We’ve already filmed over 25 women role models in AI careers and will be conducting a second virtual AI camp for girls this summer. We want to use proceeds from the AI for Humanity Prize to film additional women in AI and produce a broader series of virtual AI camps for girls.