While in some areas women thrive in business leadership, there are still many places around the world where women do not have access to resources that can help them succeed like their male counterparts. After noticing this through traveling and within their own families, EPHS juniors Aishah Alam and Avni Maheshwari decided to step up and do something about it– marking the birth of “The LeadHer Project”. After months of planning, the students were able to host their first event in August and have plans for more throughout December.
“We both had a personal connection to women in business,” Maheshwari shared on the planning behind the organization. “We’ve seen a lot of women being underrepresented in business, within our families, and when we travel, so we ultimately decided to start the LeadHer Project because of that.” Near the end of the last school year, the early planning stages for the LeadHer Project began. And while the two started this organization on their own, they also saw the opportunity to use it as a DECA project as well.
Alam and Maheshwari are both members of Eden Prairie’s DECA club, where students can compete in business-related events. One specific category of DECA competition is called project management, in which students tackle managing their own non-profit and are ranked based on their idea and execution.
“DECA is a club where you can develop business skills in a lot of different categories,” Maheshwari explained. “You learn a lot about entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, and hospitality; and there’s also a competition aspect to it, where you take your marketing plan or operations research and pitch it to a judge.” During their first year in DECA, both Alam and Maheshwari were very successful and advanced to high marks of competition at regional, state, and international levels. After competing in DECA for one year, students are given the opportunity to compete in a project management event in addition to their roleplay and written events. However, there are only 6 spots in project management, which are Community Awareness, Community Giving, Financial Literacy, Career Development, Business Solutions, and Career Project, and getting a project is a selective process. To choose what project goes to whom, each interested team had to give a pitch on their idea and which category it would fit into, and Alam and Maheshwari’s LeadHer Project was able to get a spot in the Community Awareness category.
“The overall focus of project management events is to give students the opportunity to manage a real-life project,” Alam further explained the basis of doing project management for DECA. “It’s a really good event for people who love that hands-on stuff, and it allows you to take initiative on a real problem in your community.” The problem that Alam and Maheshwari decided to take initiative on was the lack of women in business, and they’ve made great progress toward finding solutions.
The LeadHer Project’s first event was a collaboration with Evry Jewels, a trendy and affordable online jewelry company that is mainly targeted towards women. The brand has been recognized for its unique marketing techniques tailored to fit a female Gen-Z market profile, similar to that of the LeadHer Project. At the beginning of the initial planning stages, Alam and Maheshwari established a goal of raising $3,000 to provide more business resources to underprivileged women. To help them reach this financial metric, they launched an Evry Jewels code, in which any purchase made from the company using their code would go back to Alam and Maheshwari. Securing this partnership was essential to raising funds, and it is one of many collaborations that the pair found.
Another event that the pair is planning on hosting is a business leadership opportunity for women in India in collaboration with the Mann Deshi Foundation, dedicated to the economic empowerment of rural women. Established in 1996, the idea for the foundation was sparked by founder Chetna Gala Sinha when she noticed a female welder who ran a successful business but was denied the opportunity to open up a bank account in rural India due to her gender. In an attempt to address these types of situations that are unfortunately very common in the area, Sinha founded the Mann Deshi Foundation and has been very successful in providing women with business opportunities ever since.
“I’ve known about the Mann Deshi Foundation for a while,” Maheshwari shared how the partnership between the Mann Deshi Foundation and the LeadHer Project started. “We asked if they were willing to collaborate with us, and had a series of meetings over the summer where we planned out what we were going to do with them.” After months of planning, Alam and Maheshwari decided to organize an event where rural women in India can pitch entrepreneurial ideas to business professionals to get more experience in the field.
Many of the LeadHer Project’s events are centered around the goal of getting more women introduced to business skills, which was where the idea for their August selling event stemmed from.
“Our August event’s purpose was to help kids in my neighborhood set up stands to sell food and start to learn how to work with money,” Alam explained. To engage as many kids in her neighborhood as possible, she reached out to a parent group to organize different stands where kids could sell different food items to learn basic entrepreneurial skills. While establishing skills like this are often overlooked in school, they are very important in many different career fields, which is why Alam and Maheshwari decided to incorporate them into their project.
Project management events typically have students establish a few “project milestones” or key goals to implement throughout their project. For Alam and Maheshwari, these were essentially rooted in their events, with their project milestones being a donation drive, fundraising, a college networking event, a collaboration with St. Louis Park’s DECA chapter, and working with the Mann Deshi Foundation. For the November donation drive, Alam and Maheshwari are looking for new or gently used female professional clothing, such as blazers, slacks, and more, to donate to underprivileged women. For their college networking event, the LeadHer Project has invited outreach employees from multiple prestigious business schools around the area to provide girls at the high school with a networking opportunity for college.
While the LeadHer Project has numerous events currently in their planning stages, there is another that they have already completed, which is their October AVID Focus Group event. AVID, or Advancement Via Individual Determination, is a non-profit dedicated to providing K-12 students with college planning and organizational resources. At EPHS, AVID is a class that students interested in college preparation can take as part of their schedule.
“We gave a presentation to kids in AVID to inform them on the issue,” Maheshwari detailed the AVID collaboration. “And altogether we did research with them, which allowed a lot of students to become more well-versed on the issue.” Similar to the AVID focus group, another focus group was held in October with students from EP’s DECA chapter who were also interested in learning more about the LeadHer Project.
While many students see issues in their communities that they doubt could be tackled, Alam and Maheshwari took initiative on a problem that they noticed was affecting people they knew and tried to put a stop to it by starting the LeadHer Project. Although the project has only been running for the past few months, it has already made remarkable progress toward its goals and exemplifies how much of a difference students can make within their own communities and in others as well. From planning to execution, organizing events and collaborations has been nothing short of a turbulent process for Alam and Maheshwari. While they both worked hard to keep the planning process organized and structured, they both agreed that with more a more diverse point of view, they could see their project having more success in the future.
By bringing a more profound focus to women’s empowerment in business and leadership, Alam and Maheshwari have also started a program that helps to empower girls throughout EPHS to embrace their passions. The LeadHer Project broadcasts the importance of female leadership, and with the idea blooming from personal experiences within Alam and Maheshwari’s lives, the authenticity of within the project is clear.
