A CT nonprofit has sent 16K women and girls through its 'mini MBA' program. It plans to keep growing.

Nov. 13, 2023

Raised from age five onward by her single mother in southern California, Jennifer Openshaw was cleaning motel rooms at age 14 to help make ends meet — with the accompanying realization that if she was going to get ahead in life, she was going to have to do it herself.

The past six years through her nonprofit Girls With Impact, Openshaw has helped thousands of other girls and young women nationally reach the same conclusion — but in their case getting their hands dirty in the nitty-gritty nuances of entrepreneurship, with a lot of help from people who have already succeeded in startups and corporations alike.

Since launching Girls With Impact in 2017 with seed money from Fairfield County's Community Foundation and the real estate brokerage Houlihan Lawrence, Openshaw has built an annual budget in excess of $1.3 million that covers the cost of a 10-week crash courses in business and entrepreneurship for girls and women, ages 14 to 24.

"You grow up just not knowing what's out there in the world — you don't get exposed to educational opportunities," Openshaw said Thursday at the Greenwich office of SVPGlobal, which covers the cost of Girls With Impact scholarships in many states across the nation. "My theory was if you start early enough, you can really leverage it."

More than 16,000 women and girls have taken the "mini MBA" program and related Girls With Impact programs since 2018. About 2,000 Connecticut residents have enrolled to date, with New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota and California also seeing significant numbers of participants. 

The next two class cohorts begin in the second weeks of January and February, with classes running online Saturdays at noon, Tuesdays at 7 p.m., and Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Information on the course is available online at www.girlswithimpact.org.

It costs Girls With Impact about $1,000 to cover each student in the program, Openshaw said, with Eversource and United Rentals helping to fund scholarships in Connecticut.

Openshaw has set a goal of reaching about 35,000 more women and girls over the next three years, and believes the program can scale to handle a million enrollees if funding can be secured, whether from corporate and family foundations, publicly funded state programs to bolster workforce readiness, or other sources.

"We want to serve as many young women as possible," Openshaw said. "The impact on these women's lives, their families — it's helping close the wealth gap. It's creating equal opportunity for a type of education that I think is just fundamental when you are stepping into the workforce."

Openshaw still remembers the initial class of five teens who went through the first "pilot" program in 2018. Individually, the girls came up with ideas for a web site to help kids prepare for the possibility of a parent being deported; a system to help beach lifeguards pinpoint the location of people under the water's surface and at risk of drowning; menstrual kits for girls; a web site parents can tap to find babysitters with CPR training and other relevant qualifications; and a counseling service for teens experiencing depression.

While many girls and young women enter the program with aspirations of starting a business one day, a percentage do so to build general business skills, with some having an eye on a resume entry that might make them stand out from the crowd in applying for college with an actual business plan in hand.

"The old paradigm used to be you do sports, you get great grades, and you do community service or volunteer work," Openshaw said. "If everybody's doing that, how do you stand out?"

Girls With Impact graduates have stood out in a major way at the University of Connecticut, according to the executive director of UConn's Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Alumna from the program have been on half the teams that have placed in the top three prize winners in UConn startup contests over the past five years.

"I just don't see students coming out ready at 17, 18 years old to have adult conversations, to think about business in the way that they do coming out of Girls With Impact," said the Werth Institute's David Noble. "Seeing that happen in that program the way it does, it's just like 'wow' — and it's one student after another."

Darline Fleurimond is a Stamford High School graduate with majors in management information systems at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. As much as anything, Fleurimond said she signed up for Girls With Impact to figure out if she would enjoy business — she now feels strongly she will become an entrepreneur one day, after learning more of the ropes initially in a corporate job.

"I know how to take an idea and transform it into a viable business," Fleurimond said. "It's such a hard thing to do, but having all this information and having this strong foundation will definitely help me be more successful."

For her part, Openshaw says she too had a hunch her career would take her into entrepreneurship, and hopes to help more young women see it as an achievable path with the right skills, connections, effort and persistence.

"I knew I was going to start something, but I didn't have the 'it' yet," Openshaw recollected of the years leading up to the launch of Girls With Impact. "It's really about early intervention. You need to provide pre-career training to educate women about what's possible to change their mind set — that they can become a leader."