About Être
How did we come to be?
Every friend group has a story, and Être is no exception. So, how did we first come to be?
Huddle up, girls.
When Être’s founder, Illana, was a corporate lawyer in New York City, she realized that her young daughter had no idea what she did all day. Like, no idea. More than that, her daughter didn’t know what any of her super-accomplished girlfriends did: CEOs and surgeons, authors and news anchors, fashion designers and founders were simply referred to as your friend from book club or the one who’s always at the airport.
This is ridiculous, thought Illana, and easy to fix.
She started taking her daughter to lunch with these women and told her to ask every question she could think of. What’s your day like? How did you know you’d be good at your job? When have you been the most scared? When she watched her friends answer with clear-eyed wisdom and unexpected candor, Illana thought I have the greatest friends in…ever.
Then she thought, every girl should be doing this.
And that’s how Être began. Within a few years Illana built a website packed with mentorship resources and role models and called it Être, which means “To Be” in French. She liked the idea of asking girls who they wanted to be. Then she formed a Board made up entirely of middle and high school-aged girls.
All of our best ideas have come from our Board members:
I think girls at my school would like this…can I make Être a club? And just like that…Club Être was born. We now have chapters in the US, Canada, India and South Korea; all girl-founded and girl-led.
I love that we interview female leaders, but I want to see where they work. Would they let us come visit? Yep – Spotify hosted our inaugural Lunch & Learn, closely followed by events at Google, YouTube, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, NBC, Paramount, NYSE, TikTok and way more!
I love TED talks and want to do one…now. Am I too young? Nope, you’re exactly the right age! In 2021 we became a licensed TED-Ed Club and now Être girls across the globe are sharing their big ideas with the TED community. Be part of our next class!
I’m a freshman in college and I still need Être…how do I reconnect with the awesome women we met and use your network to meet new mentors? Say hey to Être Campus, a new way for us to grow with our girls and help out with LinkedIn profiles, paid internships & first jobs! Already on LinkedIn? Subscribe here to be featured!
Our first book, Être: Girls, Who Do You Want To Be, arrived in 2019 on Day of the Girl for the middle-school crowd, and won 3 awards which made us lose our minds.
Our best-selling sequel, The Epic Mentor Guide, was released in 2022 on International Women’s Day, and offers insider career advice from 180 epic women to the high school & college set. It launched on The Today Show and we not so quietly freaked out about that.
We released our first-ever national survey measuring the current state of girls’ confidence and the impact of early mentorship, and updated it this year with fresh 2024 data that confirmed our findings. The results were illuminating and proved our mission with numbers: mentors matter.
Our story is still unfolding we can’t wait to see what comes next. Our story is being shared far and wide and we are crazy proud to have been recognized repeatedly by Forbes and by Fast Company's World-Changing Ideas Awards twice. Things are happening fast and we’re here for all of it.
With every new Board member, club founder, brand partner, hosting company, and female leader we meet, our friend group grows.
Come meet our friends and write your story with us.
And ask yourself – who do you want to be?