The Beginning
I grew up in a deeply loving family that supported me in pursuing the interests that nourished my mind and heart. From an early age, I was captivated by the idea of designing organizations. After creating a post office system for a family beach trip, I was ready to dive into creating a real business. At the age of 7, I created my first successful venture: designing and selling jewelry.
My parents patiently helped me think through my pricing model and attend trade shows for wholesale supplies. Through this childhood business, I learned about pricing, marketing, pitching, sourcing, and the properties of stones. I also learned to work with and listen to customers, especially as I worked on higher-end commissioned pieces. Jewelry-making became a core part of my entrepreneurial education.
Finding My Purpose
In the summer after my freshman year at MIT, I arrived in Sri Lanka as a tsunami-relief volunteer. During this trip, I encountered a heartbreaking reality: girls as young as 11, who had endured rape, incest, or trafficking and had the courage to come forward against their perpetrators, were imprisoned for their protection for years while they testified in court. I was overwhelmed by the situation and simultaneously had a deep conviction that these young women were powerful forces for change. Many of them had come forward to protect siblings while knowing they would be ostracized from their society and removed from school. With the right skills, network, and healing support, I believed these unbelievably courageous young women could change their country as we knew it.
I started Emerge (see: www.emergelanka.org) with a $200 grant from my university and a single jewelry-making workshop. The act of creating jewelry soon became a tool for transformation, uplifting the girls' spirits and ultimately helping them to overcome the emotional, social, and economic obstacles they faced.
Emerge went on to teach skills around self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship, and leadership, and develop social and financial capital to over 1700 incredible young women. These young women have started businesses, mentored other young women, gone to law school to change policy, built entire homes, and educated their communities about reproductive health and child rights. I’ve witnessed firsthand the power of leadership training, networks, social and financial capital, and doing inner work in their lives and in my own. After growing the organization for seven years, I transitioned from Executive Director to the board, to enable a local leader in Sri Lanka to take our work forward. Letting go was both painful and powerful and I could not be more proud of all Emerge continues to achieve.
Digging Into Systems Change
When I transitioned out of Emerge, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to become a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. Across the Bay, I was shocked to find many of the same things happening that I had seen so far away in Sri Lanka: girls who were subject to rape and trafficking were often locked up - either to protect them or as a form of punishment. I began to consider the ways systems perpetuate violence and the systemic gaps and barriers that lead to social injustice. I left my job at McKinsey & Company and spent a year interviewing youth on the street, talking to policy makers, and frontline providers. What were the systemic forces and gaps at play? I took a course in systems practice (thank you Acumen and the Omidyar Group!) to identify key leverage points that could make a difference in decreasing commercial sexual exploitation in my community. And, based on this research, I co-founded Freedom Forward, a social innovation lab dedicated to preventing the commercial sexual exploitation of youth in San Francisco by transforming the systems that too often contribute to their exploitation. Guided by the voices of youth, Freedom Forward pilots collaborative and replicable approaches to address these systemic failures, so that all youth have the opportunity to thrive. Through this experience, I had the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with an incredible group of youth and partners to build pilots in partnership with the city and state to transform our ecosystem.
