Epic Mentor Halloween Edition: Who Do You Want To Be?
Let me start by saying I adore Halloween. The costumes, the candy, the creativity, and...um, the candy. With my birthday just three days beforehand, I had costume parties every year growing up; if you know me, you know how much I love this day.
This year it's especially sweet because I'm looking back on a month I can barely believe. Since our launch in 2016, Être has always had a busy fall season - think back to school, new clubs launching and International Day of the Girl events.
The past few weeks, though, truly took my breath away. As we help kids with costumes or don them ourselves today, asking each other who do you want to be, my grin grows wider with every memory. It is Être's favorite question to ask the next gen, and this month women from every industry helped us answer it.
With grateful thanks to every company, leader, mentor and Être member who made October 2024 a month to remember, all the candy imaginable to...
...our rockstar role models at The Female Quotient (looking at you Shelley Zalis, Caroline Dettman, Talia Bender Small & Carly Davidson) for dreaming up the brilliant INpowerment campaign, deciding the only way to properly spotlight the 7 extraordinary Être girls you met was to feature them on Times Square billboards, and then amassing a collection of luminaries for 25 more girls to meet in mentor moments. Wait, there was more! One week later you invited three more girls onstage at ADWEEK to discuss the power of early mentorship. Which part of this rendered me speechless? Nearly all of it.
...our money mentors at Nasdaq (waving hi to Karen Snow, Kristina Ayanian, Angie Ruan and Samantha Leavitt), who blanketed the 10th floor with Être mantras and graphics - see photos here - joined us on a financial confidence panel with Morgan Stanley's Kathleen Entwistle, CFP®, CDFA®, Selma Bueno and Anne Tamayo and Luminary founder Cate Luzio, and then flung open the door to Studio A so girls could catch confetti during the Closing Bell. Was there a better way to ring in Day of the Girl 2024? I don't think so.
...and our global and game-changing girls who passed the mic and raised their voices at our first live TED-Ed event! A full list of their names, 7 different countries, and talk titles can be found here and a link to the livestream is here. From our announcers (13-year-old Pepper Persley and 16-year-old Cameron Siegel - both Être Board members) to the icons who introduced them (Gloria Steinem, Melanie Curtis, Cady Coleman, PhD, Atoya Burleson and Daisy Auger-Domínguez (she/her/ella)) and the women who advised them, 30 girls had an army of epic mentors at their backs as they took the TED-Ed stage in NYC.
Is there enough candy to thank everyone? Probably not.
Would I knock on every door if I could and profess my thanks anyway? I would.
The theme of our TED-Ed event was, unsurprisingly, Who do you want to be, and I said in my closing remarks that I wanted to be as brave and confident as the girls who raised their voices that day and shared big ideas.
The month of October was filled with big, audacious ideas...and as every one of them took shape they exceeded my expectations. As we head into a new month and even larger goals, let's keep urging girls to dream big (billboard big) and be exactly who they want to be.
Looking forward,
Illana
