Leading Women of Tomorrow

Everyone deserves to have their voice heard in government. Women comprise 50.5% of the United States  population, yet only have 27.3% representation in Congress and 26.5% representation in parliaments globally. This disproportionately low proportion has drastic implications on the protection of women’s rights and the direction of policy concerning women. The cornerstone issues of the women’s rights movement, including equal pay, domestic violence, and access to adequate reproductive health care, cannot be expected to receive equal attention in legislative bodies without equality in representation. To make strides in the broader battle for gender equality in all walks of life, it is evident that we must first tackle the battle of equal representation in government bodies.

The battle for equality in representation is particularly difficult to address because it is somewhat cyclic: as society sees the predominance of men in positions of power, successive generations will subconsciously adopt the mindset that the field of government and politics is not suitable for women, and men will continue to be disproportionately elected. A recent study revealed that whenever a woman is elected to the Senate or Governorship,  the female legislative percentage may increase over two percent within four years. As promising as this may seem, the primary obstacles that women face when running for office is that“the electoral environment [is] highly competitive and biased against female candidates” - meaning that voters believe that women are less  qualified for elected positions in comparison to their male counterparts.

To break this cycle of institutionalized and social sexism,  , our organization  proposes that the national approach to the issue must focus upon the next generation, or the leading women of tomorrow.  We recognize that every woman’s story is different, and together we will uplift every member's story and experience helping future leading women to tomorrow strive to success

Resolving the underrepresentation of women in public service is the first step to effectively address  the problems facing the field of women’s empowerment.

Leading Women of Tomorrow prepares our members to both run for office in the future and to make a difference in their communities today via a year-long series of guiding workshops and facilitated discussions offered via live sessions on video conferencing platforms, asynchronous digital messaging forums, and private social media groups for the cohort. 

Studies have shown that women are much less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office, more likely to view the electoral environment as highly biased against female candidates, and are less likely than men to receive the suggestion to run for office — from anyone (Fox & Lawless, 2013). We want to tackle these issues directly by establishing a community that provides members professional mentorship, provides a safe space to troubleshoot shared obstacles in the journey to leadership, and fosters leading women’s interest in running for office. This safe haven for potential candidates reminds women that the face of government is changing and gives them the resources to weather the discouragement and detraction.

Our programming guides members on skills including identifying causes to advocate for your community, staying informed on issues you’re passionate about, combating imposter syndrome and sexism, leveraging social media for activism, Practicing Self-Advocacy and Resilience, and Preventing Burn-Out. Our goal with this programming is to help members cultivate passions to focus their advocacy endeavors on, to instill skills necessary for advocacy on behalf of self and others, and to promote mindfulness and balance throughout the journey to candidacy.

Our solution ultimately empowers groups typically underrepresented in government and other decision-making bodies to take action in their communities today, as a step towards their future careers promoting gender equality in all walks of life. 

The target population that we are hoping to serve with this programming consists chiefly of women and girls interested in running for office. This population is by nature quite diverse, but we hope that the programming we intend to put together will be particularly beneficial for women and girls who do not have access to what are widely regarded as the more “traditional” pathways to build a career in politics. This could be due to geographic location, socioeconomic status, age, or a variety of other factors. The common denominator is that this population is largely unfamiliar or potentially intimidated by the process of running for public office.

Historically, Leading Women of Tomorrow has had great success engaging women interested in running for office who are currently enrolled in a four-year degree program via our campus chapter model. While it has helped us grow our membership significantly in a short span of time, the campus chapter model leaves us entirely unable to engage with the many more women who may be interested in running for office but are not served by our current model because they either are not currently in an undergraduate degree program, or are not on a campus that we currently serve.

Leading Women of Tomorrow’s solution will address this gap by providing content and a community that program beneficiaries can engage with regardless of any factors above that may limit their ability to participate in more traditional programming. This will be digital content that can be accessed anywhere, in addition to being explicitly non-partisan and designed so that a participant from any socioeconomic background or level of educational attainment can engage with it. We intend to create an online community that participants can use to connect with each other, as well as, eventually, Leading Women of Tomorrow members who are affiliated with a campus chapter. We believe that growing and integrating our community will make Leading Women of Tomorrow’s programming more meaningful to more participants, regardless of the medium in which they engage.

Leading Women of Tomorrow was born from our founding board’s shared life-long experiences of ceaseless discouragement towards their desire to run for office due to their gender. We, the founding board, were our membership base only a few short years ago, and still experience this antiquated, gendered dejection on a regular basis. We know the reflections and resources necessary to cultivate and maintain a passion for public service because we were fortunate enough to be able to have each other’s help and support to identify them. 

We want to make these tools more accessible to students using our intimate knowledge of how to promote engagement on college campuses. We were students ourselves when we founded Leading Women of Tomorrow, and were able to recognize underutilized modes of campus communication for recruitment and opportunities for funding local events. Beyond using this knowledge to establish our initial campus chapters, we were interested in growing and developing a nationwide network of future leaders. We soon began developing the broader organization and assembling the first iteration of the corporate staff.

Over the past five years, Leading Women of Tomorrow has developed an extensive network of campus chapters and a robust community of alumni. Many early corporate staff members have stayed on in advisory capacities and provide valuable guidance to the current corporate staff, which remains primarily run by current students.  Our student-led leadership is what has allowed our organization to recognize and leverage such overlooked assets and to grow at this pace we have. 

Leading Women of Tomorrow has survived early growing pains as well as the unique challenges created by the pandemic, which forced us to pivot to virtual programming but also emphasized the advantages of our nationwide model by allowing chapters to learn from each other. Our network created a community and delivered content that many students found valuable in the early weeks and months of the pandemic.

However, we have become aware that there is a large vacuum we can fill by expanding beyond this framework and developing an expanded virtual presence. In addition to virtual programming serving as a viable alternative for students on campuses that cannot support a traditional chapter, we believe that virtual programming is the perfect opportunity to move beyond our current limitation of only being able to reach potential members on college campuses.

Our current corporate staff and seasoned mentors, who are driven by their first hand experiences with these challenges, are well-positioned to develop our organization's infrastructure to deliver this programming at a broader scale, enabling us to make this expansion a reality.

There are a number of reasons why Leading Women of Tomorrow is a great fit for the program, but we are chiefly motivated by the degree to which we believe we can scale with the program's support. We have already grown impressively in the five years that we’ve been active, but we would benefit from support in further developing an adapted programming model, establishing a position about how best to enhance the efficiency of our technological integrations, and driving an effective go-to-market strategy. With this support, Leading Women of Tomorrow will be equipped to begin serving a much larger population.

Our learnings over the past five years of engaging campus chapter members have left us with a wealth of ideas for how we could make our program better. We have experience transitioning some of our existing programs to a virtual medium both during the pandemic and in efforts to support various international initiatives. While engaging, these endeavors were not purpose-built for engaging participants outside of the campus chapter paradigm.

We are seeking support to implement an online curriculum-based program that incorporates Leading Women of Tomorrow’s values and the best of our existing programming. Our goal is to deliver our curriculum in a format that is engaging for members participating remotely and likely asynchronously, without the inbuilt engagement provided by being physically present with others. Upon completion of our program, members should not only feel equipped with the knowledge to run for office or otherwise lead, but have access to a community of similarly impassioned leaders from across the world.

We suspect that the major area in which we will need support is in refining our distribution and go-to-market strategy, since the target audience for this curriculum will necessarily not be one we are likely to reach today. We are also acutely aware that we will need to invest large amounts of time, and potentially resources, into design and development work. 

That said, we believe that our biggest need right now is simply the business model and strategy development work of creating the course itself--we want this to be a legitimately differentiated, high-quality experience that drives high rates of satisfaction among participants. Support in creating this experience will empower Leading Women of Tomorrow to not only expand the number of members we can engage, but also to begin to expand our capabilities and community beyond the campuses where we currently have a presence. We also hope that collaborations with other teams affiliated with the program during this process will guide our development, and allow our members to access novel social ventures that they may be able to join and channel their talents and new skills into. It is this expansion in the scope of our impact that will ultimately help us usher in the next stage of accomplishing our mission.

The past few election cycles in the United States have seen increasing levels of participation by women and young people, not only as voters but as candidates too. This is certainly to be celebrated, but at the same time, many more would-be candidates are likely dissuaded from running because they feel they lack the experience, connections, or other resources necessary to organize a successful candidacy.

Leading Women of Tomorrow has experienced this tendency first-hand as our nationwide network of campus chapters has steadily expanded since 2018. While some of Leading Women of Tomorrow's oldest and most active chapters are, predictably, located on Washington DC-area campuses, our organization has grown to encompass chapters all over the country. Many of our members are attracted to Leading Women of Tomorrow because they want to run for office one day, but only a few have access to networks and resources in their day-to-day lives that can help prepare them. 

As post-pandemic campus life continues to evolve, new leaders and members of existing Leading Women of Tomorrow chapters work to reestablish their clubs after semesters if not years of remote participation. This, and the accompanying semester-long process to gain campus recognition and funding, has made it challenging to continue growing our domestic presence at a rapid rate. Additionally, our existing model has proven difficult to scale globally. While we previously experimented with establishing chapters in Europe, differences in higher education models across countries made it difficult to manage and support global chapters in a consistent fashion.

Campus chapters have served Leading Women of Tomorrow well and will remain at the core of our programming for the foreseeable future. That said, we believe we can serve a much larger population and scale far more effectively by expanding our offering to include digital programming agnostic of student status or campus affiliation. Expanding beyond the campus chapter model will allow us to expand our programming to serve non-students and individual students without a chapter on their campus, eliminate the lengthy club recognition process for a new chapter as a barrier to student participation, create programming that can be delivered consistently even in a hybrid or remote environment, and allow us to reach broader audiences with an eye to revisiting international expansion.

Leading Women of Tomorrow’s first five years were spent growing at a steady pace, but largely within the same model. Our goals for the future are all laser-focused around expanding not just in numbers, but in terms of our organizational capability. In the short term, this looks like solving the long-standing limitations of the campus chapter model and continuing to ensure Leading Women of Tomorrow's resiliency as campus life continues to evolve post-pandemic. In the longer term, however, we are exploring several options to serve new populations entirely–and this program could help us do just that in an accelerated timeframe.

Our primary goal for the next year is to begin engaging members outside of our existing chapter framework. We continue to scope this effort, but at a minimum we are targeting to develop programming that enables students to meaningfully participate without needing to formally establish a chapter. Currently, most tangible LWT programming happens at the chapter level, with support, guidance, and occasional organization-wide initiatives coming from the corporate staff. This has allowed for incredible creativity and diversity of thought and programming in Leading Women of Tomorrow’s early years, but has also posed limitations. Students generally need to get their chapter recognized as a club to get access to campus space and resources, which can take as long as a semester at many universities, and often requires considerable time and administrative work from chapter leaders just to get a chapter established–-to say nothing of recruiting and engaging prospective chapter members. Our goal for the next year is to establish a year-long leadership program at the corporate/national level to allow members to engage directly, either instead of or while working on the establishment of a traditional chapter, to reduce the amount of time it takes for them to see value in engaging with LWT. This has the added benefit of allowing us to drive a baseline level of consistency in the member experience across chapters.

Over the next five years, we want to build on this work to ultimately be able to create programming that is truly relevant and accessible to any woman interested in political leadership, and expand our outreach accordingly. The “table stakes” work here includes things like developing a more robust approach to engaging with our alumni network, which we envision becoming agnostic of participation format over time, and establishing a practicum program in which NGO leaders and community organizers specialized in various sustainable development goals guide members on how to make tangible change in their communities now. We want to establish mechanisms to give members hands-on experience. We also anticipate that, as a result of the work we are doing now, we will become better positioned to revisit international expansion, which we see as the capstone of our work to make our programming as relevant and accessible to as many members as possible.

To date, we have measured our progress towards our engagement goals via metrics on our  membership, in-person chapters, alumni successfully migrated to their distinct social media group and listserv, and our social media reach. As we migrate to more forms of digital engagement in the coming year, we anticipate we will continue to use these measures, as well as event attendance and rates of successful completion of program expectations. 

More longitudinally, we hope maintaining avenues of engagement with alumni will allow us to track the proportion of members who eventually do run for office, work in public service, or hold leadership positions. As we have already had our first Leading Women launch a campaign for city council, we are looking forward to disseminating this data in the coming years. 

Leading Women of Tomorrow was ultimately founded to increase women’s political participation. We are not unique in that regard, and the efficacy of trainings similar to the one we are designing is proven–organizations like Emerge America consistently see large numbers of their. alumnae run for office. Our theory of change at a broad level is that women are more likely to run for office not only when they have had exposure to the process and to political life, but also when they are connected with their peers who are also interested in political leadership.

The successes seen by our peer organizations supports the theory that training and programming can make women feel better prepared to run for office. As a bonus, when women are elected to public office, they frequently enact policies that encourage greater female participation in public life, effectively increasing the likelihood that additional women will join them in elected office over time. 

We believe that Leading Women of Tomorrow can differentiate itself by providing this training alongside programming that is engaging for members regardless of how close or far they are to being ready to run. Over time, we hope to be able to engage our growing alumni network to continue to support members even after they may no longer be participating actively in our programming.

In the medium term, we hope to be able to integrate our virtual and campus chapter models to not only give members access to training but access to a community that they feel equips them to begin participating politically regardless of their background.

We believe that this combination of training and a community will encourage a more diverse population of women to consider running for office, which will ultimately be reflected in the long term outcome of an increase in the number of women actually running. A version of this metric–the number of Leading Women of Tomorrow program alumni who go on to run for office is anticipated to become one of our north star metrics as the organization continues to mature.

At this point in time, we have developed a set of core requirements for the program, included below, that we believe we can use to both establish expectations for participants and to guide formal development of our technical requirements.

Our virtual program that runs from September 2023 through May 2024: Members are required to attend three live sessions, three elective sessions, and 1 virtual pre-recorded session for successful completion of the program requirements. For all sessions, a feedback form has to be submitted as a record of attendance. 

1. 1. If an individual is interested in attending an elective session, then they must pre-register for it. During the session, attendance will be taken.

   2. The program will include, but not be limited to, topics in political advocacy, campaign work, public policy. Proposed Sessions for the 2023-24 program include: 

1. 1. 1. Finding your Purpose

      2. Civics 101

      3. Staying Informed: A Guide to Navigating the News Realm at the Local and National Level

      4. Combating Imposter Syndrome and sexism

      5. Leveraging Social Media for Activism

      6. Practicing Self-Advocacy and Resilience 

      7. Networking and Mentorship Roundtable

      8. The Finances Behind a Campaign

      9. Leadership and Lessons Learned: Panel with Candidates from Local and National Office

      10. Preventing Burn-Out

Our community is accessible to members and alumni via our: 

1. 1. Slack Forum, which allows members to meet Leading Women from across the globe, get advice on professional development, access mentors, and more! 

   2. LinkedIn Groups to celebrate the professional accomplishments of Leading Women and to foster connections with similarly impassioned members in member’s community. 

   3. Membership Directory to find other Leading Women who are open to connecting and sharing their experiences

In this first iteration of this program, we can likely leverage free or lower-cost tiers of existing, publicly-available applications to deliver the program. The two major technical requirements for a “minimum viable product” include a video conferencing platform (Zoom, GoogleHangouts) to enable live classes, and an asynchronous collaboration platform (Slack) as a “scrappy” way to enable the virtual community component. We are fairly confident that videoconferencing will require a monetary investment early on, in order to enable the features we need to make the content more engaging.

If we see success with this initial cohort, it is possible that we could eventually explore moving to more purpose-built technology to support this program long term. However, because we expect that we can use these digital modalities to feasibly support a pilot or first iteration of this program this year at little to no cost, the preference is to move forward with this more lightweight tech stack for now and revisit this decision if it becomes clear down the road that we want to scale the program.

Leading Women of Tomorrow has always considered diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) to be part of our core values. Over the past several years we have made it a priority to elevate marginalized voices on our platforms, but there is certainly more we can do. Developing programming at the national level for consumption directly by members presents a big opportunity for us to evaluate how we can be more fully integrate DE&I into our programming. 

Our existing campus chapter framework presents both an asset and an obstacle to our DE&I work. Because individual chapters have wide latitude to design their own programming, the content covered therein varies considerably from chapter to chapter. This can, and does, create an environment where diverse viewpoints can be surfaced, discussed, and contested, but it also means that the corporate staff and advisory board have historically had difficulty ensuring consistency.

One benefit of the move to begin providing programming directly from the advisory board or corporate staff to members is the opportunity it will present for organizational leadership to enforce greater standardization in what is ultimately shared with members, ensuring that this material is consistent with Leading Women of Tomorrow’s values. We intend to take this opportunity to evaluate how we can better center marginalized voices in our programming and to establish diversity, equity and inclusion guidelines at the organizational level, to be reflected in the programming we distribute. This will also help us establish a baseline understanding of how well chapter programming conforms to our diversity, equity and inclusion goals, allowing us to course correct as necessary.

Leading Women of Tomorrow offers female-identifying and non-binary students the skills, resources, and community to prepare for careers involving public service and advocacy. Our program provides students with guided asynchronous exercises to help them identify their passions and talents, creates innovative workshops in which they can further develop their leadership skills, and bears a global community of colleagues and mentors accessible via our Slack channel, member directory, and alumni LinkedIn group. Our partnerships with The Yale Campaign School, PERIOD., A Tribe of Women, the International Association of Political Science Students, Vote In or Out, and Vote Forward also allows us to host novel events on different ways members can begin advocating for their communities ahead of their run for office and helps members forge connections with these groups for further professional development. 

Thus far, Leading Women of Tomorrow has operated in an university-affiliated chapter format. This means that corporate staff or passionate students from a given university will disseminate information about our organization and a call for chapter leaders via departmental listservs, cold-emails to Professors with requests for forwarding to their courses, and pre-professional offices. We then work closely with recruited leaders to affiliate their chapter with the university, which allows them to reserve spaces on campus and to receive their own budget from their Student Organization Office to support campus events and programming. This has made chapters fiscally independent from the national organization, and has allowed us to maintain a narrow cost structure at the national level. 

The national organization generates revenues through multiple streams, including merchandise sales (4%), graduation cord sales (27%), pre-professional advisor services offered by the Alumni Relations department (4%), fundraisers (31%), and donations (26%). Our national costs are largely limited to maintenance of our website, domain, and graphic design software. However, in order to successfully disseminate our programming to a large cohort, we will need to expand our video conferencing software to host our digital events. Our goal is to utilize our surplus to fairly compensate our corporate staff and to broaden our range of in person events. 

Leading Women of Tomorrow’s value truly lies in the sustainable nature of its approach to gender equality in governance. We are not simply calling upon women to run now, after they have experienced a lifetime of socialization to the contrary, but are systematically deprogramming the toxic discouraging messaging our members have received early on. Dismantling these beliefs early on and equipping women with the skills to plan their trajectories in public service and leadership--this is how Leading Women of Tomorrow will close the gender gap in parliaments for generations to come. 

Our organization was initially founded with a seed grant from the Resolution Project at the 2017 Youth Assembly. Since then, we have evolved to a model that is a hybrid of traditional service subsidization and organizational support models. Our revenue streams include merchandise sales, graduation cord sales, pre-professional advisor services offered by the Alumni Relations department, fundraisers, and donations. Our most successful fundraisers, including digital BINGO donation cards and embedded donation forms within our store, have capitalized on our digital media marketing.  

While this mixed model has been successful to date, with the help of this program, we would like to establish more longitudinal sources of funding. We are currently in the process of applying for 501-(c)-3 status. Attaining this status would make us eligible for a broader array of financial grants to promote our financial sustainability and longitudinal goals. We would guidance on applying for these grants, as well as feedback on novel ways we may be able to build on the momentum from our digital fundraisers throughout the year to improve our year-long merchandise and donation campaigns. 

Leading Women of Tomorrow was established with an initial grant from the Resolution Project. Following this award, our organization has established several revenue streams that are both long-standing (merchandise sales, donations, pre-professional advisor services) and seasonal (graduation cords, fundraisers). Diversification of our income sources and conscious cost cutting endeavors by our team have allowed us to remain financially solvent since our inception in 2017. 

While we are fiscally prepared for global expansion in the 2024-2025 school year, we hope achieving 501-(c)-3 status soon will allow us to apply for grant funding, and allow us to more comfortably support this expansion of our fixed expenses. This will also allow us to also begin working towards our goals of international expansion, implementation of our Practicum action program, and integrating our course programming into a more sophisticated one-stop access portal.