Q&A with Tara Abrahams: Glamour Magazine Engages Companies in The Girl Project to Advance Girls’ Education Worldwide
By Alice Korngold and Tara Abrahams
Source: Glamour
Tara Abrahams leads The Girl Project at Glamour Magazine to help companies connect with their customers and create a philanthropic legacy by investing in girls’ education. In this Q&A, Abrahams describes how The Girl Project transforms the lives of girls and advances economic development.
Q: What does The Girl Project seek to accomplish?
Around the world, 50 million girls are not getting the quality education they deserve. Issues such as child marriage, gender-based violence, and war and civil unrest prevent girls from completing secondary school. In the U.S., teenage pregnancy, unsafe neighborhoods, low self-esteem, and general conditions of poverty stand in the way of girls finishing high school and moving on to post-secondary education and work opportunities.
In December 2013, Glamour celebrated our annual Women of the Year Awards, and one honoree truly stole the show: Malala Yousafzai. Her brave cause, built around the simple idea of providing girls the opportunity to go to school, inspired both her Nobel Peace Prize and the millions of Glamour readers who heard her story. Glamour has long championed women’s causes through our content, and as we continued our coverage of the struggle of young women to get an education, we were struck by our readers’ outpouring of support and passion for this urgent issue. We know that our millennial audience responds to brands that practice what they preach—so because of Malala and because of our readers, The Girl Project was born.
The Girl Project seeks to unleash the vast economic and social power of girls through education. To accomplish our mission, we engage our millions of readers in the issue of girls’ education and bring to light the barriers that girls face in going to school and staying there. We launched our work in 2014 with partners CARE, Communities in Schools, Girls Inc., and Plan International, and in 2016, brought on additional partners Lower Eastside Girls Club and She’s the First. To date, The Girl Project has had a direct impact on thousands of girls around the world, and will soon reach the milestone of having granted $1 million in funds to girls’ education programs, including scholarships, mentoring, afterschool programs, and career training and support. Financial support is provided by our corporate and foundation partners, including Maybelline, The Caterpillar Foundation, and EcoTools.
Q: What’s the connection between The Girl Project and Glamour?
The Girl Project is a philanthropic initiative of Glamour magazine. Specifically, it is a fund set up by Glamour to support girls’ secondary education around the world. Glamour believes that millennial women respond to brands with purpose—and that Glamour is stronger when we can show our audience, our partners, and our own staff that we are committed to improving women’s lives in a real and tangible way.
On a practical level, The Girl Project is integrated into numerous aspects of Glamour as a magazine and as a brand. The Girl Project maintains a content hub on Glamour.com, which contains articles on girls’ education in the U.S. and globally—from the ongoing efforts to bring back the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014, to the persistence of laws that permit child marriage in the United States. In addition, Glamour incorporates The Girl Project into its signature event, “Women of the Year,” an annual summit and awards ceremony that celebrates trailblazing women from a variety of fields, including scientists, politicians, celebrities, and activists. Since The Girl Project’s inception, Women of the Year has featured girls from our partner programs, in order to elevate the issue of girls’ education and raise awareness among our millions of readers and viewers.
Q: In joining The Girl Project recently, you bring highly relevant experience. What has best prepared you for this position, and what about it most appeals to you?
What was most attractive to me about this role was The Girl Project’s intense focus on the issue that drives me every single day: girls’ education around the world. I developed this passion at Girl Rising, a global campaign for girls’ education anchored by a feature film released in 2013, telling the stories of nine girls in nine different countries around the world, including Egypt, Peru, India, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. Girl Rising introduced me to the power of girls’ education, and I feel incredibly fortunate that I can now continue to make progress on this issue at The Girl Project and Glamour, in collaboration with our committed partners in the NGO, policy, and private sectors.
Apart from issue alignment, I’m eager to apply my business acumen and management training to my work at The Girl Project. I recognized early on in my career the value of applying private sector strategies to mission-driven or “for-purpose” organizations. By doing so, nonprofit organizations would be much better equipped to achieve the impact they intended for their target beneficiaries—from girls struggling to go to school to wildlife in need of conservation efforts. Working at Glamour and The Girl Project, we have the opportunity to partner closely with brands whose values align with our mission, and who are deeply committed to investing in girls’ education as a way to connect with their customers in a new way and to create a philanthropic legacy.
Q: What do you see as the greatest challenges for The Girl Project?
A: I believe that the primary challenge for The Girl Project will be to identify corporate and philanthropic partners who recognize the value of Glamour’s storytelling platform. There are many incredibly worthy girls’ education initiatives to support; the unique value that Glamour brings is our ability to collaborate with policy leaders and cultural icons alike to raise global awareness of the issue to millions of supporters around the world. Glamour generates monthly engagement in the range of 40 million—10.2 million through the print magazine, 11.2 million through our digital platform, and 19 million through video and social media combined. Beyond this vast reach, Glamour has deep experience in engaging this audience in a compelling and meaningful way through magazine articles, live events such as Women of the Year, and social media campaigns with celebrities and influencers.
Since launching The Girl Project in 2014, for example, Glamour has created unforgettable live event experiences to highlight the importance of girls’ education. Former First Lady Michelle Obama and celebrity advocates including Sophia Bush, Charlize Theron, and Yara Shahidi joined us on two powerhouse panels that brought together thousands of students and stakeholders to elevate the cause of The Girl Project. These events generated millions of media impressions and most importantly, elevated the voice of girls around the world in a global conversation about their dreams. It is our hope is that new philanthropic partners will engage with Glamour in this dialogue on the importance of investing in girls’ futures, leveraging the power of Glamour’s multiple storytelling platforms and spreading the girls’ education message around the globe.
Q: How can companies help The Girl Project improve the lives of girls worldwide, and what’s the business case?
Fifty-one percent of the U.S. population are women, and women in this country currently hold 81 percent of the buying power. We know that millennial women in particular respond to brands with purpose, and that we at Glamour are stronger when we can demonstrate that we are truly committed to improving women’s lives. When we help create brighter futures for the more than 50 million teenage girls currently out of school worldwide, communities and whole economies improve. Educated girls become empowered women, women with higher incomes and an increased ability to make decisions for themselves and for their families. For Glamour’s advertisers, as well as for other companies who are eager to connect with this coveted and influential demographic worldwide, The Girl Project represents an incredible opportunity to have an impact on an urgent social issue and at the same time deepen their relationship with their target customers.
It is our belief that every company has an incentive to invest in girls’ education, whether through The Girl Project or through another initiative that aligns with their brand’s values and strategy. When girls are educated, opportunity grows—not only for those girls themselves, but for everyone, including companies who want to expand into a new market or grow their customer base. From providing mentoring support and career training to donating laptops to funding secondary school scholarships, companies from all sectors have a unique opportunity to invest their resources in improving the lives of girls around the world.
Fifty million girls around the world are not in school—The Girl Project believes this is a problem that needs solving. And we all have a role to play in the solution.
About the Guest:
Tara Abrahams
Executive Director
The Girl Project
Tara Abrahams is the executive director of The Girl Project at Glamour, the magazine’s philanthropic initiative to support girls’ secondary education. Tara previously served as president and deputy director of the Girl Rising campaign. Tara has worked with Girls Who Code, International Center for Research on Women, Maverick Capital Foundation, and The Bridgespan Group. Tara graduated with honors from Harvard College and completed her MBA at the Harvard Business School, where she received the Horace W. Goldsmith Fellowship for outstanding contributions to the nonprofit sector.
About the Author:
Alice Korngold
Author
A Better World, Inc.: How Companies Profit by Solving Global Problems…Where Governments Cannot
Alice Korngold is co-editor of Giving Thoughts and the author of A Better World, Inc.: How Companies Profit by Solving Global Problems…Where Governments Cannot (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Leveraging Good Will: Strengthening Nonprofits by Engaging Businesses (Jossey Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2005). For over 20 years, she has been training and placing business executives on NGO/nonprofit boards and consulting to corporations, foundations, and NGOs/nonprofits on board governance, CSR, and sustainability. Twitter: @alicekorngold
