IdeeThe Start Small Movement Mentorship Program

The Start Small Movement Mentorship Program is a new initiative currently in the planning phase, designed to launch in Summer 2026. While The Start Small Movement (TSSM) already exists as a broader grassroots effort founded by two high school sophomores in 2024, the Mentorship Program itself is an entirely new, not launched expansion of our model, currently being designed, staffed, and prepared for its first cohort. It is this program, not TSSM as a whole, that is the subject of this CEC submission. The problem. Two groups of women and girls are systematically underserved, and the gaps compound each other. First, teen girls rarely have access to real professional mentorship, skills training, or career exposure, opportunities typically gate kept by family wealth and personal connections. Second, female-founded small businesses can't afford the marketing, design, and digital services their better-capitalized competitors access easily. Both gaps reinforce structural inequality over time and hold back the economic growth of women-led ventures. The idea. The TSSM Mentorship Program is a free, cohort-based training and internship pipeline that closes both gaps simultaneously. Teen girls apply and are matched with female professional mentors across four high-demand sectors: Social Media & Content, Graphic Design, Website & Digital, and Email Marketing. The program runs three cohorts per year, a 12-week cohort in Fall and Spring, and an 8-week cohort in Summer. Each cohort follows a structured weekly cadence of mentor sessions, group collaboration calls, assignments, and a mid-program check-in. Crucially, throughout the program, mentees work on real deliverables for real female-founded businesses, not simulated projects. Top performers earn a supervised internship with a TSSM partner business at the end of the program. Every mentee is a teen girl. Every mentor is a female professional. Every business we serve is female-founded. The model is designed so that every participant in the pipeline wins: mentees gain skills, portfolios, and their first meaningful professional experience; businesses gain services they couldn't otherwise afford, fueling their growth; and mentors gain visibility and community. Why it works. Because every deliverable is real, all participants are accountable to actual outcomes. This is what makes the model sustainable and scalable where traditional volunteer programs stall. Mentees stay engaged because their work matters. Businesses stay involved because they receive real value. Mentors stay committed because they're building something tangible, not just donating time. SDG alignment. SDG 5 (Gender Equality): Every mentee, mentor, and served business is female. The program systematically redirects educational and economic opportunity toward women and girls at every stage of the pipeline. SDG 4 (Quality Education): Free, real-world entrepreneurship and digital-skills training delivered by working professionals, opportunities traditional schools don't provide. SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth): Teen mentees gain their first meaningful professional work experience, while female-founded small businesses receive the marketing and digital support they need to grow sustainably. The program builds both the future workforce and the businesses that will employ them. SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Removes two forms of gatekeeping at once, access to professional mentorship for teens without well-connected families, and access to affordable business services for female founders without access to capital. Why we're ready to launch this. Although the Mentorship Program itself is new and not launched yet, TSSM's earlier informal work has already tested the underlying model. Over the past year, our small founding team has delivered real work to multiple female-founded businesses across every one of the sectors the Mentorship Program will teach: Social media, website design, graphic design, content writing, and email marketing. That hands-on experience is what gives us the confidence to formalize and scale this into a repeatable, cohort-based program. What we're building toward. The Mentorship Program transforms TSSM from a small volunteer effort into a scalable pipeline. We're targeting 20-24 teen mentees and 4-6 partner businesses per cohort, roughly 60-72 teens trained and 12-18 businesses served annually once fully operational. Long-term, our vision is to formalize TSSM as a nonprofit and build a global network of chapters, each running the same cohort model in their own community. The CEC would help us take the first major step: recruiting mentors at scale, building international visibility, and connecting with entrepreneurs solving adjacent problems around the world. We're starting small. We're creating big successes. Together.

As the co-founder of The Start Small Movement, my expertise is in building grassroots programs that serve female-founded small businesses. I have hands-on experience with social media strategy, Instagram growth, website design, graphic design, content writing, and email marketing for small businesses, all skills I've applied to real client work through TSSM. I'm also experienced in designing structured mentorship programs, recruiting teen volunteers, and partnering with small business owners. I can support other organizations by: sharing what I've learned building a teen-led nonprofit from scratch, collaborating on initiatives that empower young women or support female entrepreneurship, and offering a youth perspective on projects targeting Gen Z audiences. I'm especially excited to connect with other teen or youth-led social ventures and with anyone building at the intersection of education, gender equality, and small business support.