Career Girls Role Model Video Platform

You can’t be what you can’t see. Career Girls addresses the lack of role models for girls, especially for under-served populations, such as girls of color and girls facing economic hardship.

But seeing a role model is not enough. Girls also need the instructional ‘how to be it’ component to set themselves on a path for success.

Career Girls is a free digital career exploration and readiness platform - accessible both online and offline - featuring videos of hundreds of diverse and successful women role models. The platform not only provides inspiration and insights, but offers tangible action steps and tools for girls to plan and prepare for their futures.

Pilot programs in the US and in Rwanda already demonstrate the current demand and potential for increased global impact. Keys to successful global scaling include filming local role models and the development of culturally relevant curriculum and programming.

Globally, there is a staggering lack of access to diverse, accomplished women role models for girls. This problem is particularly pronounced for girls of color and in areas of economic hardship.

Role models are a vital component of education because they show what is possible and provide a roadmap for success. Role models motivate girls to stay on track academically, which positions them to pursue higher education and a career of their choosing.

Without education, girls are shut off from higher-paying jobs and higher standards of living. They have less agency over their lives, GDP suffers and the cycle of poverty continues.

A girl’s access to role models is limited by geographic and social proximity, cultural expectations and stereotypes. These barriers are magnified by economic disruptors such as the COVID 19 pandemic.

“Parents in more traditionally conservative nations tend to prioritize the education of their sons, experts say. So when families lose income, they’re more likely to stretch the budget on schooling for boys”, said Laila Gad, UNICEF’s representative in Liberia, a former Ebola hotspot.

While providing inspiration for girls, the presence of women role models with high earning potential could also persuade families that education is worth the investment.

Career Girls is a free digital career exploration and readiness platform – accessible both online and offline – featuring video interviews of diverse and accomplished women role models sharing what they do, how they got there, and what girls need to do now to prepare for a career of their choosing.

Career Girls can be accessed directly online by girls, or can be used as a teaching tool by educators, mentors and parents. 

The CareerGirls.org website offers:

• 13,000+ videos from interviews with 700 women role models
• A personality based career quiz
• Detailed career information pages
• College major information pages
• Career exploration video lesson series
• Skill development video lesson series
• Toolkits for educators, parents and mentors

Career Girls also offers:

• Career Girls Empowerment Workshops
• Career Girls Clubs
• Career Girls Day Events
• Career Girls Virtual Camps

Offline access is provided through World Possible’s RACHEL portable hotspot and their OER2Go portal and Learning Equality’s Kolibri App.

Our content is reflective of our global viewing audience and our downloadable curriculum can be easily tailored to fit within a local context. Partnerships with local implementing organizations ensures that our content is culturally relevant.

Our target population is all girls ages 10 to 13, with a special focus on girls of color and girls facing economic hardship. We selected this age group based on research from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). In their study, “Why So Few”, this is a crucial time for girls to learn from women role models. If they see women they identify with, they are much more likely to stay on track academically. Their subsequent academic success helps to level the playing field with boys and keeps them from falling behind.

We conduct focus groups and implement pilot projects to test and iterate our programming to understand and meet the needs of the girls we serve. We gain additional insights from our school counselor advisory board, curriculum experts, teachers, and other youth development experts.

As an international platform we currently include hundreds of role models from around the world, including 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. As we scale, we will continue to interview inspiring women from all over the globe so that every girl, no matter her background, will be able to find women that she can relate to, learn from and begin to imagine her future. 

Career Girls aligns with the goals of the Challenge and Dimension:

• Problem - Marginalized girls and young women have unequal access to quality education.
• Goal - Increasing number of girls and young women participating in formal and informal learning and training.
• Our Solution - A free digital career exploration and readiness platform featuring videos of hundreds of diverse, successful women role models:
  • Inspires girls to invest in their own education
  • Changes societal perceptions to encourage investment in girls’ education
  • Offers valuable insights and skill-based career readiness curriculum
  • Focuses on digital literacy and STEM careers
  • Easily scaled and adapted for cultural relevance

Career Girls Role Model Video Platform is unique in that we pair inspiring videos from diverse and accomplished women sharing their career, education, and life stories with concrete career preparation and college study information to help a girl learn how to create her action plan for success. 
 
Some websites provide the text of role model stories such as FabFems. Makers offer videos of celebrities and prominent career women. Other sites provide career readiness and college preparation information. These include the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the College Board, respectively. Career Girls is the only website that combines the two to create, “see it to be it” and “how to be it” that is designed for girls and freely available to them.

Our innovative approach creates a platform for diverse and successful women to scale their mentoring, advice, and hard-fought lessons learned to reach a global audience in perpetuity. All girls, no matter their background, can learn from the individual and collective wisdom of role models around the world.

Career Girls is a digital platform that uses traditional video and website technology, but in a new and innovative way. Some of the technologies we use are Wordpress, Vimeo, YouTube, RACHEL portable hotspot, OER2Go and the Kolibri App.
 
Without Career Girls, there are more than enough diverse, accomplished women role models who would like to be a positive influence on the next generation of girls. And, there are millions of girls who would benefit from the collective knowledge and experience of these role models.
 
At its core, Career Girls is simply a platform to connect the two groups in a safe and scalable manner. Career Girls does not tell girls what they should think. We only provide them with access to the stories and advice from the hundreds of women role models who were once girls just like them.

Evidence that this technology works is our continued growth in site visitors, and especially returning site visitors. 
 
In addition to our online website, our RACHEL platform has been widely used in several countries since 2017.

Career Girls’ Theory of Change is centered on our mission to close the imagination gap for girls around the world. Our organization is founded on the dream that every girl around the world has access to diverse and accomplished women role models - to learn from their experiences and to discover their path to empowerment. Career Girls concentrates its work into four priority areas: 1) Directly screening videos of role models in schools and college preparation sessions; 2) Developing and deploying curricula for educators, leveraging videos from role models on diverse career choices and unique barriers for girls; 3) Providing role models a platform to share their stories, and 4) Showcasing successes and share stories at key national and global fora. By conducting these activities, Career Girls strives to achieve the following three outcomes: 1) Increasing girls’ self-confidence and awareness of a wide range of career options; 2) Increasing role models’ interest in mentorship and determining girls’ career choices, and 3) Increasing educators’ and caregivers’ access to resources regarding diverse career choices for girls.

Since our website went live in January 2011, we have had 17 million page views from 232 countries and territories worldwide. Each year we have experienced significant growth in the number of visitors, page views, video views, subscribers, and followers on our social media channels. 
 
We are currently on pace to serve more than 4,000,000 visitors to our website this year.
 
Although in-person engagement with girls is on hold during the current COVID 19 pandemic, we see an opportunity to grow through virtual camps and workshops.

The constraints of the pandemic also give us growth opportunities for our online content. We anticipate serving over 20,000,000 highly engaged visitors each year to our site within five years.

A key to growth will be building relationships and developing culturally relevant content with local implementing partners to scale our direct engagement with girls, schools and other youth development organizations.

Another key to growth is developing the capacity to serve the high unmet demand from educators and group leaders to expand direct programming opportunities. The Career Girls online platform and content are inherently easy to scale by design. However, nurturing alliances and partnerships require an increase in staffing levels. 

Creating a community outreach manager position would allow for exponential growth and impact over the next five years from direct engagement activities such as:
Career Girls Clubs
Career Girls Day Events
Career Girls Empowerment Workshops
Career Girls Virtual Camps
Train the Trainers Program

We have a backlog of hundreds of requests from educators and group leaders. Developing the capacity to administer a robust Train the Trainers Program is critical to meeting current and future demand over the next five years.

The lack of funding is the most significant barrier to scaling our impact. For example, we currently have a high unmet demand for our Career Girls Clubs and Career Girls Days programming. Still, we lack the capacity to address the current backlog of requests. 
 
Developing partnerships with local implementing partners is another key to increasing our impact.
 
Funding is also required to expand the number of role models available on our site so that we can meet the specific needs of all girls around the world.

We are looking for partners to directly fund or work together to find funding to support our community outreach efforts, video content, and curriculum.

We welcome partners to collaborate with us in local projects using our content to augment or supplement their programming in alignment with our goals to close the imagination gap for girls.

Full-time staff - 3
Part-time staff - 4
Contractors - 6

The founder created the concept to address the lack of career women role models in forging a meaningful and rewarding career. After attaining career success, she wanted to ensure that girls coming up behind her,  especially girls like her - girls of color experiencing economic hardship -  to see diverse and accomplished women to close the imagination gap for what is possible in their lives.

Our team has extensive experience and technical knowledge in video production, design, business strategy, communications, accounting, legal and curriculum development.

Most importantly, our entire team is driven by the motivation to make positive change in the world.

Career Girls has a long history of working with skills-based volunteers and our organization’s work is based on the foundation of volunteerism. Career Girls has interviewed close to 700 role models, diverse and accomplished women who have succeeded in their chosen fields. Our role models believe in the nonprofit Career Girls cause and participate without pay, volunteering their time to share inspirational — and practical — stories about their careers to improve outcomes for girls worldwide. 

Today, Career Girls videos are seen around the world on multiple platforms, including TES Global and Share My Lesson. Career Girls collaborates with many organizations, including Global Fund for Women, Young Women in Bio, El Camino College, Girls Academic Leadership Academy, Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Foundation, and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, which features Career Girls in its interactive STEM exhibition.

Some recent implementing partners from Rwanda  include Starlight Africa in Rwanda, Girl Guides  and Mothering Across Continents.

We provide low-cost scalable role model video platform for girls and educators. We rely on donors and funders to support the work we do.

We will submit funding requests to foundations, corporations and government agencies to support our work. 

We understand the power that comes from partnerships and know that our work aligns with the goals of MIT Solve. We would like to be accepted into the Solve program for all of the reasons mentioned on the Solve website, but are especially appreciative of the opportunity to join a supportive community of peers and to receive mentorship and strategic advice from Solve and MIT networks.

Five solvers that we would like to partner with are TeachMobile by Eneza, Laboratoria, Girls Who Build, Digital Citizen Fund, and Refactored.ai.

Partnerships would likely center on the development and distribution of our content for key stakeholders – educators, mentors, parents, and girls. There might also be opportunities for geographically or thematically based video production.

We would like to film role models from refugee communities to share their experiences to foster resilience in girls around the world. Having completed three role model videos in Africa and Asia, we are experienced in setting up our productions in international locations and filming women from various backgrounds responding to our questions in their native languages.

We are qualified for the Innovation for Women Prize because we amplify the voices of hundreds of diverse and accomplished women from all over the United States and several countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. The stories these women share on our platform are changing girls' lives. They are providing them with living examples of how to be successful in life and the workplace. They gladly share what they have learned to help the next generation of girls.

By making our content accessible via the RACHEL OER2Go site and the Kolibri App, we ensure access to this knowledge base is available online and offline no matter where girls live and regardless of their surroundings.

Our team would use funding from this prize to conduct global role model video shoots and to implement pilot projects that directly engage girls around the world.

The mission of Career Girls strongly aligns with the goals of the GM Prize on Learning for Girls and Women. Career Girls presents a wide variety of career choices on our website. Still, our focus is on STEM-related careers, with a particular interest in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Robotics. We target girls ages 10 - 13 to tie our intervention to the critical juncture in keeping girls on track in math and science so that they can enter the STEM pipeline in college and continue through to the workplace. We are focused on enhancing learning opportunities for girls and women by increasing access to career exploration and college readiness information, focusing on STEM, for the world's most vulnerable girls.

We want to use funds from the prize to 1) expand the number of role models with additional video shoots, and 2) to create a curriculum to support a deeper understanding of STEM.

We are qualified because inclusivity is a core tenet of Career Girls, and our program has a strong emphasis on preparing girls for careers in tech, entrepreneurship, and other professions requiring digital literacy skills.

We would use proceeds from the award to fund a role model video shoot in Portugal and to develop culturally relevant material with local implementing partners for direct engagement with girls.

Yes. We are qualified for two reasons. First, we are strong proponents of preparing a diverse set of girls for careers in AI. We’ve already filmed over 20 women role models in ​AI careers​ and will be conducting a virtual AI camp for girls this summer. We want to use proceeds from the AI for Humanity Prize to film additional women in AI and produce a broader series of virtual AI camps for girls.

Second, we would like to use the AI for Humanity Prize to incorporate AI into our Career Girls platform to create a more immersive, interactive, and impactful experience for girls.