Send a Fellow

There is a room at the United Nations that most girls never see.

On October 9, seven of ours will walk into it.

They are 16, 17, 18 years old. They come from families where a trip to New York is not something you book, it's something you save for. This summer, while their friends were at the pool, they spent five weeks in the Emerging Women Leaders Global Fellowship — writing leadership projects, presenting to women with decades in boardrooms and courtrooms and city halls, learning to speak in a voice that doesn't ask permission.

Then the invitation came. The Working Group on Girls selected our fellows to attend "Girls Speak Out" at United Nations Headquarters, the summit that marks International Day of the Girl. They will sit alongside girl advocates from every continent. They will hear from women who have shaped policy on three of them. One of them has been nominated to take the stage herself.

Nobody handed them this. They earned it.

What stands in the way is small, and it is everything.

A flight to New York. Three nights in a hotel. Meals. A badge. Roughly $1,500 per fellow — the ordinary cost of getting a teenager somewhere extraordinary.

For more than 90 years, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs, Inc. has existed to make sure Black women are in the room where things are decided. Our founders did it without institutional money, without permission, and mostly without anyone's help but each other's. The Emerging Women Leaders Global Fellowship is that same promise made to the next generation, early — before anyone has finished telling them what they can't do.

Here is what your gift does, exactly.

$50 feeds one fellow for a day in New York.
$150 puts her in a hotel bed for a night.
$500 gets her on the plane.
$1,500 sends her for the whole weekend, start to finish.

Every dollar goes to this trip. Not to overhead, not to a general fund. To seven girls and the weekend that will change how they see themselves.

Then they will tell you about it.

The fellows are documenting the whole trip. When they come home, you'll get the photos, the video, and their own words about what it was like to stand in that room. You will know exactly what you paid for, because they will show you.

This trip is the beginning, not the end. NANBPWC's investment in our youth and collegiate women is about to get much bigger, and the people who funded the very first delegation will be the first to hear what comes next.

October 8 is the last day to give. They fly on the 9th.

Send a fellow.