The First Million

Nikole Collins-Puri

09.02.20

Under Nikole’s leadership, Techbridge Girls has expanded from 1,000 girls served to over 25,000 - in just 4 years! But it isn’t time for her to rest. Techbridge Girls has a goal to serve 1 Million girls by 2030, bring quality STEM education to women across the nation.

Summary:

Under Nikole’s leadership, Techbridge Girls has expanded from 1,000 girls served to over 25,000 – in just 4 years! But it isn’t time for her to rest. Techbridge Girls has a goal to serve 1 Million girls by 2030, bring quality STEM education to women across the nation.

Thuy

Nikole, you've been head of Techbridge Girls for about four years now. And when you first started, the organization was serving about one thousand girls a year and now it's twenty five thousand girls annually. So congratulations on that success. But I know that's not enough for you. You have a bold goal. You want to reach one million girls by 2030. So how are you planning to do that strategically?
Nikole_Collins-Puri

Nikole Collins-Puri

So our bold goal to reach a million girls by 2030 is really grounded in two things. Number one, we need partners to help us move our curriculum and our training and the delivery of quality program to more communities across this country. And we also know that technology plays a role. How can we enable ourselves to reach communities that we can't reach in our current, you know, office reach or within our certain regions? So how can we get to rural communities? How can we get to Native American communities through technology to really help supplement that ability to have access to quality STEM education that is geared and founded and grounded on, you know, gender and cultural affirming curriculum, so that our girls can see themselves, their experiences, their relevance of what a STEM career could look like. But also STEM concepts through their everyday lives. So that is how we feel we're going to be able to get there. It's really about creating greater partnerships and utilizing and leveraging technology to supplement, not replace, supplement our ability to reach more communities that we are not so closely connected to.