"It is an incredible privilege that I try to earn every day to get to be the CEO of Girl Up. It's an interesting leadership role because I don't feel like it's my movement. It's not about me. And so as the CEO, I often tell our Girl Up leaders that this is their movement, I'm the vessel that makes it possible. You tell me where we go, where we're pointed, and it's my job to get us there. And so I approach leadership as a partnership. I partner with my staff, I partner with my team, but I also partner with the very youth and girls that we serve. I think of myself as the Chief Partnership Officer.”

“There's been a couple times in the last five, six years where [our Girl Up leaders] have reached out to me and said, ‘I don't really love what's happening right now. This isn't what we want you to do.’ Sometimes it’s huge and sometimes it’s specific: ‘We don't want you to partner with this company,’ or ‘We don't want to work with this celebrity.’ I know why we are doing it, and why the situation exists. I know all the challenges that our staff is trying to work through and what they want this organization to look like from the inside out. And what I realized the first time this happened is that [our Girl Up leaders] do not care about my explanation. They want to be heard. 

“What I take with me into my leadership is I can explain, I can defend, I can teach, I can do all these things that adults like to do to young people. But first I'm going to listen. And then I'm going to say, ‘What in this can I say yes to?’ I do not start with no, I start with yes. And if I mean when I say this is their movement, that has to always guide me.”

“There were two moments. When I was about to graduate from college, I was set to head to the advertising agency world, and I had this out-of-nowhere kind of moment of, ‘Are you going to go toil away doing this? They don't pay well, you work a lot of hours. Is this the work that you want to grind for in these early years?’ I happened to be in a school project where we were working with a nonprofit doing a PR campaign, and it felt like: ‘Wait, if I'm going to grind and I'm not going to get paid very much, would it be better to put my energy and hours and time towards this greater good?’ That was my first aha moment that the nonprofit industry was potentially a good fit. 

“I had eight solid years of really great nonprofit experience and I was good at it. I kept moving through responsibility and raising my title and my leadership, but it wasn't my cause. It was just a good cause. And then one day I learned about Girl Up while I was at my old job and it was a lightning-strike moment. It sparked something totally different for me than just doing good work and being good at it—which had fueled the first half of my career—to be like this is my work. I had a personal connection to what education meant for me when I was younger, what I went through in middle school, and my safe haven in education. And so I turned towards it. Sometimes we have those lightning-bolt moments, but we just keep forging ahead where we already are. Don't just keep down a path. Allow yourself to be surprised and to walk towards those surprises because you never know. You could end up as the CEO of Girl Up. I think being open is what landed me here doing this job. It still feels like my purpose and is still my cause. And I'm just so lucky that I found it when I did.”

“I see shifts forward and backward. I think that we, globally, have less rights as girls and women than we did almost 13 years ago. And that's not just here in the US. That's everywhere. It's not better. In fact, it's worse in some ways. But on the flip side of that, I see a much more empowered and powerful youth voice than was there 13 years ago. I think that all of the challenges, all of the crises, and all of the setbacks, rollbacks, divisiveness that just makes it hard to exist as a human right now are actually what has fueled this powerful response. Girls, gender-nonconforming individuals, and youth especially have different tools, have more access, and are starting to be respected. That was not the case when I first started at Girl Up and when Girl Up first started. So I do think there's a shift towards the potential of what this generation will do once they really take up their space and are listened to and respected.”