Name: Niko Everett
Age: 31
Title and organization: Co-Chief Executive Officer, Girls for a Change
Connection to YWSE: Co-founded YWSE in 1999
Associations/memberships: Democratic National Committee, Planned Parenthood, NARAL: Pro-Choice America
Awards/honors: Draper
Richards Foundation fellowship for social entrepreneurs in 2007, one of
the “40 Under 40” up and comers in the Silicon Valley by The Silicon
Valley Business Journal, KQED Local Hero (Women’s History Month)
Hobbies: Outdoors, sailing, triathlons and marathons
This is the first profile we’re writing for Faces of YWSE. While
talking about successes, we also want to share the challenges and
frustrations you’ve experienced.
I highly value sharing career
challenges with aspiring women. At a panel I attended recently, I felt
overwhelmed by the successes of the $20 to 50 million companies. I
wanted to hear the challenging moments — what happened when they
couldn’t pay the bills, when the staff staged a coup. But these people
seemed so perfect, when in fact everyone has issues and failures.
We’d like to start our conversation by asking where you grew up. What’s your history?
I
grew up in New York and was the first in my family to go to college. My
father was a carpenter and my mother a waitress, who graduated from
college at the same time I did. While a loving family, alcoholism in
the family brought challenges for growing up — a character builder. I
grew up the poor kid in the neighborhood, because my carpenter father
bought a “carpenter special” in a wealthy neighborhood to fix up.
Why did you start Girls for a Change and where do you see it going?
Coming
out of college, I had a graphic design and art history major. I had a
personal interest in supporting women and girls, but didn’t see that as
a career. I left college with a great portfolio, got a prestigious
internship, but left after a week because I was miserable sitting in
the office all day. I quickly got a job teaching public speaking and
art at a New Hampshire boarding school with international students. I
was a dorm mother to the girls. At the same time, I was reading about
adolescent girls and found a career passion there. But I didn’t know
anyone in the field, and didn’t know how to network into nonprofits. I
sent my resume to many organizations, got nothing back, and felt
depressed. I felt I had a lot to give, and wanted the right venue to
blow people away.
Arriving in California to house sit for an old couple who were family friends, I found the suburb and waitressing also depressing! I had no friends here and was bummed out because I didn’t know what I was doing in the world. At the restaurant, I enviously watched busy professionals coming in and out. I started looking at newspaper job listings and began work at the Cross Cultural Community Center, leading a self-esteem workshop, then Girl Scouts, where I worked with middle school girls and did outreach in lower income neighborhoods.
Without experience in this field, I had to make it up, and now see how important it is for women to realize that making it up is actually equivalent to being entrepreneurial. Stereotypically, women have more self-doubt than men, feeling unequipped if we haven’t been to school for it. I saw the biggest challenge as a loss of self-esteem in middle schoolers, a time when they’re facing pregnancy, gangs, and drugs. Their own communities didn’t see them as an asset — they were tax liabilities that people were paying for, not a resource. But if my colleagues and I could increase both their self-efficacy and concurrently the community’s view of the girls, we might be able to empower these girls to make powerful decisions for themselves and for their communities. That’s how Girls for a Change got its legs.
What do you envision for your work and your life in the near future?
With $700,000 in new investment, Girls for a Change will expand from 2 sites to 10 new sites in the next 5 years.
What are some of your biggest challenges?
A lot of the
challenges that I have experienced came before Girls for a Change —
feeling like I had something special to give but not knowing how, not
knowing the right people. I wanted to work with passion, and be on the
cover of Time. How do we create that network amongst the women we know,
to navigate toward the career of one’s choice? I’ve had doubts about
following my heart. There was no specific linear path for me to follow,
no guidebook. So I got a coach and developed a vision for what I wanted
my life to look like: “I want to transform the world for low income
girls, so that they are incredible resources for themselves and their
communities, and make an impact on how we see women in general. I want
to be paid well, I want to be in charge, I want to work with smart
women to make it happen.” I created an intention to make it real with
the coach. YWSE and personal coaching helped me to make it happen. I’m
not making a million, but I make a respectable living doing exactly
what I want, on my own schedule.
How did co-founding and participating in YWSE help you in your growth?
YWSE
gave me my first experience seeing how setting one’s mind on something
can make it happen. I had moved to California a few years before and
had few local friends before YWSE. Now, in 2007, 9 years after helping
to found YWSE, my best friends are women who were all on the board of
YWSE in the past. My deepest friendships came out of that group of
women… as well as incredible personal and professional resources for me
and Girls For A Change. From building our careers in the same room, we
now enjoy some power and authority and are sharing that with each
other. My friends and I will grow this support base more and more.
That’s the power of YWSE. All of us will continue to work and grow.
It’s an old boy’s network, only it’s a girls network. I hope that we
all know that YWSE is a network we can tap into.
Do you have advice for young women who are social entrepreneurs?
The
bottom line that I wish I had known is: You’ll hit your stride. Trust
that. You’ll be doing what you want to do. Just trust it, it sometimes
takes time. I had a nightmare vision of being a dowdy housewife doing
nothing in a suburb, miserable and depressed. Now I’m running an
organization that just got major investment because of its leadership —
my leadership and my potential to grow further. If someone had said I’d
be where I am now in 7 years, I would have relaxed a little bit. I was
so stressed. I want women entrepreneurs to know that with charisma and
vision to be what they want, they can do it, however they want.
Who do you admire?
I admire my closest friends, women out
of the YWSE network — they have been the biggest influence on my life.
They reflect back to me who they think I am. To this day, there’s
plenty of self-doubt for me. I recommend finding a great mentor. Your
closest friends can act as mentors sometimes. Mostly I needed someone
to say I’m smart and would be successful. I tell Girls for a Change
coaches that they are successful if they tell the girls that they are
brilliant, at every single meeting. We don’t live in a world where we
hear that very often. Luckily, because of these women friends, I do
hear that almost every day!
What books do you recommend?
I really enjoy Ram Dass for
the spirituality, which is really important — a belief that there is
something bigger happening that I’m a part of. The Secret as well. It’s
not something we don’t know, but a reminder to put the knowledge in
place that intention attracts what we want in our lives. I recommend a
book by YWSE co-founder Sara Ellis Conant’s father, David Ellis,
Creating Your Future, a very straightforward workbook. And his Falling
Awake workshop. I’ve also done Landmark courses, which were helpful at
the right time in my life.
What are your top values in your life and work?
I value
being in touch with something bigger than myself through meditation,
through the women’s circle, through being outside every day. Spending
time with special people, choosing people who are inspiring and
positive. I end relationships that I get nothing from or are negative.
I choose not to tolerate those relationships any more. I still struggle
with getting unstructured time alone. In those moments, some of my most
brilliant insights from my life occur. I’m 5 months pregnant now and
want to be sure I cherish, now and with a child, time alone. Also, my
relationship with my husband has inspired and supported me along the
way. He is amazing. (My advice, don’t settle for anyone less then
amazing as your partner!)
How do political partnerships help nonprofits?
They are
very useful to us as a nonprofit. We work mostly with local
politicians, who help make things happen. For example, I needed space
for 1,500 girls, but didn’t have money to pay for it. Miraculously,
they found space. Politicians are great connectors who can find
resources. Many have written checks themselves. The also provide good
marketing and PR because they are constantly trying to connect people,
and will say, “You need to meet Niko.”
I speak a lot to high schools and colleges on women’s panels. I talk about Girls for a Change frequently, how it’s going. All this amazing-wonderful-exciting stuff. I have so much gratitude. BUT I want to express how many challenges I had before Girls for a Change. I didn’t know what it would look like or who would help me. I have the best life. And I have high standards for a good life. For many years I didn’t know what I would do. It’s so easy to hear a one-sided success story and think, It’s different for me, my life is hard. But it is not different for you! Anyone can have exactly what they want, I promise!
When you have children of your own, how will you treat them to empower them best?
I
hope I can do the same thing that I do with the girls that I work with.
I tell them they can accomplish anything they want. I would reflect to
my children their potential and give them space. I would encourage them
to fail – there’s the saying that if you’re not getting No’s, you’re
not asking for enough. You should get really good at going for the gold
and falling flat on your face. It’s nice to stay in our comfort zone.
That’s a good reminder for me to keep going for the no, it is hard to
remember.
Read about Girls for a Change
Interview on March 12, 2007, 2:30 pm by Adriana Dakin and Tania Hurter, Board Members, YWSE-SF
