GREENLIGHT for STEM

We know the well documented research around gender equity in the workplace and that female participation in STEM-related careers and activities has remained virtually stagnant over the past decade. While there are many programs working to create a pipeline and pathway for underrepresented groups, including those identifying as female, g4g knows that we need to engage girls at a particular crucial age in their development to keep them engaged in pursuing STEM subjects and careers.

Global need to address gender equity in STEM

• Confidence levels plummet for young girls between the ages of 10 and 15 years old – by 11 it is already down to 75%.  Once girls reach 15 years old, this number drops to 55%.
• Less than 10% of young girls in Europe consider becoming a scientist.
• One in every three girls in the developing world is married by the age of 18, and they tend to drop out of school when they get married.
• Women in U.S. STEM fields remain underrepresented in engineering (15%), the physical sciences (31%), and computer and mathematical sciences (25%).
• Research indicates a mere 1%-2% increase in women in long-term STEM careers over the past 10 years.
• Globally, women comprise roughly 30% of researchers in science, technology, and innovation.

At greenlight for girls, we wanted to dig deeper into the root causes for these disparities in gender equity in STEM so we could create the best opportunities to shift this paradigm.

Let’s give GIRLS the GREENLIGHT to unlock the fun and future in STEM

We worked with the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of Leuven to partner in a global Impact Study to gain more insight into girls' interest in STEM-fields, and to find out how this correlates to greenlight for girls’ impact.  With more than 700 girls taking part in this research, we found three important findings:

• Girls’ lack of confidence and their perception of lack of skills often related to a decreased interest in pursuing STEM.
• Girls are more interested in pursuing STEM subjects when they feel it gives them a sense of community.
• Girls feel encouraged to pursue STEM by their close environment and by strong role models who inspire them.

The study also validated our approach to create global programs that use our STEM+Creativity pedagogy to raise girls’ interests in STEM, to increase their self-confidence, and to provide them with role models and a STEM community they are seeking.

Our work over the past 12-years has provided more than 450 hands-on learning events directly to more than 60,000 young women in more than 103 cities with over 13,000 role models.  With our GREENLIGHT for STEM programs, we aim to reach 50,000 more young women in the coming year.

What if learning WAS different?

GREENLIGHT for STEM is an awe-inspiring learning event that encourages young girls to be future STEM adventurers.  This program is designed to introduce 10–15-year-old girls to role models in STEM as they engage with hands-on science taught by experts in these fields. Our event cross-links pillars of education, STEM, sustainability, and inclusion while engaging corporate and community volunteer role models.

For each program event, 200 girls are invited from a cross-section of a local community to register through their home, their school, or community to embark on a creative-learning ride that will spark their interest in STEM.  Our approach complements all the standard learning processes and gives it some oomph - along with a story-driven lab coat, generally super dancy music, the magic wand of confidence, and getting your geek on to be super curious as to how things work and why. That's what we do. We do learning differently.

These young adventurers are first invited into our digital laboratory space days before the event to start their curiosity into what lies ahead, followed by a full day of experiments, building inventions, & meeting STEM role models on-site in their city, and then continue after the event back in our digital lab where they can continue to work on their inventions & connect with peers & mentors.

As with all of our programs, our aim is to inspire girls to see their future in STEM and connect science to the world around them. Our g4g events are structured specifically to enable skill-building and expertise sharing while demonstrating the fun in science and technology through hands-on workshops and activities.

Greenlight for girls creates fun and exciting hands-on educational events showing the link of STEM to all careers and all interests through a tested learning pedagogy of STEM + creativity & design thinking approaches. This has resulted in transformational outcomes where, after attending our programs, 94% of all girls wish to build their skills and studies in STEM. We design and produce these programs in a language that girls can understand, both literally and figuratively by conducting our programs in the local language and using age-appropriate speaking styles.

We light up the eyes of these future STEM adventurers - with our in-person inspirational events and our on-line digital lab - and by using our tried-and-tested STEM+CREATIVITY pedagogy to show them how exactly they can invent solutions for the future. Because the future needs these kids to be the problem solvers, inventors, and changemakers of tomorrow. And we tell them this.

What if we inspired thousands of girls and young women around the world to study STEM?

This is our aim – to inspire thousands of girls that will want to continue building their skills in STEM for their future.  Our primary stakeholders are girls aged 10-15 years old as we know this is the precise age when girls start to lose confidence in themselves and their abilities and begin to believe they are less qualified to pursue STEM subjects.

We invite girls and children identifying as females from all backgrounds to our events.  At least 20%, and often 100%, of the girls participating at our events are coming from low socio-economic environments and underserved communities that are often overlooked or lack opportunities to attend events such as ours.

We define “underserved communities” as those that face barriers and challenges in accessing and using resources due to geographic location, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, racial, and ethnic populations. We extend that further to include those that face technological barriers and those educationally-challenged due to gender-science stereotypes.

While the girls are our primary stakeholders, we also work with and serve a much broader community, including corporate and community volunteers, teachers, and parents.

We work with a vast array of organizations in STEM industries who wish to involve their team members in impacting the community around them and making a difference in gender equity in STEM.  These volunteers play an enormous role, not only in that moment to inspire these young women around them, but they often see the impact of these events and ask us if they can help to create them in another part of the country.  This is how g4g has grown to conduct these events in more than 103 cities.

During these events, we also serve the teachers.  We often hold parallel workshops during the event that provides an exchange of pedagogical ideas with teachers in the community.  They then ask if they can continue to have our support to connect STEM professionals to more students in their school.

Over the course of 12 years of our work, we’ve had the opportunity to see the impact from the girls who attended our very first event to how this has impacted their lives.  We have countless stories from the girls, their parents, their teachers, and the volunteer role models we engage that tell us how our events have changed their trajectory towards a more confident future that involves STEM in skills, studies, and already some career choices.   

• “It is because of you that I am an engineer today.”
• “Attending a greenlight for girls event gave me the idea to choose Chemistry & Sustainability as my majors in University.” 
• “You inspired me when I was 12 years old and now I am applying to work for g4g and do the same for others.”

Our non-profit, greenlight for girls, was created by Founder, Melissa Rancourt, who has 30+ years’ experience as an engineer, as a professor on strategic design, and as an entrepreneur – all with the focus of experiential design and expertise in creative learning pedagogies.  With her guidance, the team has developed and tested a new learning pedagogy, STEM+Creativity, that has been used for more than 400 events.  As an Engineer, Melissa has had close proximity to the issue of gender equity having had seen the reality in university studies in the ‘80s until now in society, with little significant difference in the gender balance in STEM subjects overall, which was the impetus for creating g4g.

Our team also includes our Board members, one of which Sarah Thomas, EdD, leads the program that educates new teachers in one of the oldest teaching universities in the US, Bridgewater State.  She and the Professors in her team activate pre-service teachers by giving them an opportunity to practice and hone their skills while creating lessons and activities in new and more hands-on ways, including using greenlight for girls events as learning opportunities for these future STEM teachers.

Another of our Board Members, Andrea Dewey, is a STEM Teacher in the New York School system and helps greenlight for girls to validate the learning methods for primary and middle school children.  Andrea recently participated in the MIT Raise Day of AI learning and introduced this to our greenlight for girls network that we aim to take further.

With them along with our full greenlight for girls team, we are strongly connected to several universities in the US, Bridgewater State, Chatham University, Parsons School of Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, Wentworth Institute of Tech, Babson College, Boston University to name a few, and several large corporations where we engage STEM role models to be a part of our events such as Procter & Gamble, Cisco, AIG, and CDK Global. 

Our GREENLIGHT for STEM events serves 60,000 young girls across 103 cities with the involvement of 13,000 STEM professionals and more than 150 partner organizations.  In the US, we have conducted events in the states of Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas, California, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, Maryland, Oregon and Pennsylvania.  

We have a tested and proven method for engaging girls and are eager to scale this to reach even more girls across the US. Our focus is to go where girls need us the most, not just the major cities. For example, in the Boston area, there is great desire for us to bring programs to the City of Boston, but also to gateway cities like Brockton.  Also, we look to engage our past partners & event locations in the US to help us reach more girls and more communities – event Partners & Individuals have included NASA, the Executive Chef to the White House, IEEE, Girl Scouts of America, SWE, ASME, to name a few, in addition to our corporate partners.   We believe that the MIT Solve and Tiger Global Impact Ventures network can leverage the reach we can provide to conduct more GREENLIGHT for STEM events throughout the US.

Emily Weiner has been connecting people and ideas to activate change throughout the US (and beyond) for more than 25 years, and has worked in a variety of careers across sectors, including corporate, nonprofit, academia, and politics. She is a boundary spanner and dot connector, and has leveraged her longstanding relationships in each of these domains to connect young people to adult role models and mentors.  Emily spent 11 years leading several verticals of impact work at Babson College’s Institute for Social Innovation, including as interim director of the Youth Impact Lab where she developed both formal and informal learning programs.  She has taught more than 1,000 high school students from across the US to connect to their passions, cultivate new skills, and embrace societal problems as entrepreneurial opportunities, and she is particularly passionate about empowering the next generation of leaders who identify as female.

Emily is an alumna of Wellesley College and has served as a volunteer, Board member, and advisor for a multitude of nonprofits, startups, and individual changemakers. She is currently an RSA Fellow, a Global Advisor to Orora Global, and an Advisory Board member of Community Dispute Settlement Center.

GREENLIGHT for STEM uses a new pedagogical method, a new process for solving this challenge, and a creative business model to make this all work and scale. 

G4g’s pedagogy and process was all created by asking the following questions: What if learning was different? What if we changed the perception of science, technology, engineering & mathematics subjects and careers? What if we could make a difference to ONE person? And that lead to impacting so many more? What if we inspired thousands of girls and young women around the world to study STEM? What if girls around the world could really know that Anything is Possible for them and their futures?

We inspire our girls to understand the importance of learning and the importance of their role in making a change in the community around them. Through learning science, technology, engineering & mathematics - and the connection to creative problem solving - the young students of today can be the changemakers & inventors of tomorrow.  

This GREENLIGHT for STEM solution is part of our organization’s larger moonshot to reach 50,000 girls to inspire them to pursue studies in STEM.  In one year. How do we know we can do this? Because we've done it already. We've reached 60,000 girls of all ages and all across the world by creating 450+ inspiring, fun, hands-on learning events that build confidence and STEM skills with the help of our network of over 13,000 STEM mentors. These girls = 60,000 transformational stories where we've had the chance to spark their dreams for the future. How do we know it works? Because we asked them. 94% of all participants tell us they now want to pursue STEM subjects after our events.

We will do this through leveraging our passionate network of partner organizations and individuals who are engaging in our Power of 10 initiative to reach more teachers, parents, schools, and other associations.

Our next five years’ goal include creating learning methods that are valuable and adapted by teachers and university programs that educate teachers.  Our new pedagogical method and connection to both schools and universities, particularly those that educate future teachers, which we are already working in partnership to create GREENLIGHT for STEM events in their communities. 

We measure our progress to meet our goals in this simple way:  we capture the stories from the girls, the volunteers, the parents, the teachers, the team through survey results, video testimonials, examples for what they write on their labcoats, the emails sent after an event telling us the impact, the girls that stop us on the street after an event – or 10 years after an event, the parents who say thank you for inspiring my child for their future.  We measure them in quantitative and qualitative methods to identify how our learning methods and experiential events have created the impact we are striving to achieve.

We also look for anecdotal signs of success, such as the father who emailed us a week after one of our events asking how he could get his little girl to take off her labcoat that she’d been wearing for 5 days straight.  Or the mother who emailed us the day after and said how she loved our event, but why, oh why, did her little one wake her up at 6am on a Sunday to show her how to extract DNA from a strawberry.  

We ask the girls to yell, ‘Anything is Possible’, as loud as they can after every GREENLIGHT for STEM event.  We show them their future is possible throughout the day by instilling their curiosity to learn more, to confidently attack what they don’t know, and to connect them to a larger community who will encourage them and give them a GREENLIGHT for STEM.

Every element of this program will only be made possible because of technology, and technology is the driving force that will enable girls everywhere to access opportunities to activate their STEM learning in a fun and engaging way. Technology is embedded into everything that g4g does, whether that’s in face-to-face programs or via online learning and community-based platforms.

Our digital lab is a new technology that enables us to connect to the girls before and after events to create a continuum of learning, inspiration, and community.  During events, we teach coding and use technology in several workshops to show the link to every subject and the need to build confidence and learn tech skills for any job in the future.  The face-to-face programs will ignite and inspire girls with a combination of multiple hands-on, tech-based workshops that specifically enable skill-building and expertise sharing. This fluidity of programming is only possible because of technology.

In addition, while we want to reach every corner of the US, there are some areas where we cannot necessarily connect to girls in person. The virtual engagement through technology allows us to reach and inspire girls to become STEM Adventurers no matter their geography or circumstances.

2 Full-time Staff, 6 Part-time Contractors, 5 Part-time project freelancers

Greenlight for girls is 12 years young, established in 2010 as a global nonprofit organization and has been conducting programs throughout the US since that time. g4g was incorporated in the US as a 501(c)3 in 2019.

As we say in our values of the organization, EQUITY is our North Star.  Greenlight for girls is committed to fostering, cultivating, and preserving a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion as we carry out our mission. As an organization dedicated to encouraging girls of all ages to explore STEM learning opportunities and careers, we recognize that we cannot be successful without welcoming all perspectives, incorporating all points of view, and continually moving toward a world where everyone is provided the same opportunity to thrive.  The collective sum of the individual differences, life experiences, knowledge, inventiveness, innovation, self-expression, unique capabilities, and talent that our board, staff, volunteers, and youth engaged in our programming invest in their involvement, shapes a significant part of our shared culture but of greenlight for girls’ reputation and organizational achievement.

Greenlight for girls defines diversity, equity, and inclusion as:

• Diversity: Representation across a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and views.

• Equity: Fair and equitable treatment, access, opportunity, and engagement for all.

• Inclusion: Environment that respects and values all perspectives, especially ensuring that persons within historically underrepresented groups are included and represented.

Collectively, these contribute to our sense of belonging and an organization that the full potential of individuals where innovation thrives and views, beliefs, and values are integrated.

As an organization dedicated to fostering the participation of girls in STEM career exploration, our organization is directed, counseled, and operated predominately by, but not only by, individuals identifying as women. Our Board and Board of Advisors also includes individuals from various geographical areas and cultures, including US, Europe, India, and Africa. Our global team includes women and men from across the US, Brazil, Europe, India, Nepal, and Australia. Our entire network of volunteers, including our young ambassadors and our fellowship community, bring together a diversity of individuals across gender, national origins, socio-economic levels, educational backgrounds and more.

The girls, parents, and teachers never pay for our GREENLIGHT for STEM events.  Our business model is to use donations, sponsorships, grants – coming from companies, foundations, and philanthropic individuals – to fund our projects and our ability to create these impactful events.  Each event is carefully crafted and designed to provide the best learning impact where the majority of funds go to learning materials and on-site needs to make the events possible.  

Our sustainable financial strategy continues to be 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 – meaning we engage funding opportunities across corporate entities, government & educational grants, and philanthropic individuals.  This strategy has served us for the past 12 years and it will catapult us to the next 50 years of growth.  This enables us to balance risk and economic downturn so we are not depending on only one or a few sources of income to be able to provide this impact to the girls we serve. 

We need to engage further long-term partnerships to create more growth and scalable opportunities – and this is our focus for the current and next three years.  

We have successfully achieved large funding grants and sponsorships from the following organizations which has enabled us to conduct events in 103 cities:  US Embassy, Nokia, Cisco, AIG, Covestro, Avantor, P&G, Ashland, Ministry of Education (each up to 100k+).

These funding sources – along with smaller projects (10k+ each) and philanthropic individuals – have enabled us to impact 60,000 girls which has turned into 60,000 transformative stories, plus more from their parents, teachers, role models in companies, and anyone who gets involved. These 60,000 girls have become catalysts of enthusiasm for learning to the community as they can't help but share what they experienced (sometimes even showing their siblings how the internet works using only string, or proudly wearing their own DNA on a pendant and impressing their parents with fun facts about shared DNA with fruit). But, you know what? All of that.  It's not enough. There is a huge needle we need to move - and that is the needle of equity. Equity in the classroom, at home, in the lab, on the field, in the office, in the boardroom - we need more women to be part of the STEM equation.

To do so, organizations such as ours, need further support to keep impact growing.  MIT Solve and the Tiger Global Impact Ventures will certainly help us to do so.