It’s not every day that high school girls get to spend an afternoon interviewing the world’s most powerful women.
On Monday, Thomson Reuters partnered with ANN Inc. to create this opportunity by co-sponsoring the Notebook Mentoring platform at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit – and I was lucky enough to have a front row seat.
The session buzzed with dynamic personalities and the room came to life as summit delegates began mentoring and sharing knowledge with young ladies from Camp Pendleton – a major United States Marine Corps base in Southern California.
Eileen Lynch, SVP of Global Brand Marketing, represented Thomson Reuters by participating as a mentor said, “My favorite aspect of participating in this session was having the opportunity to witness the degree of confidence and inner strength of these young students – which I believe in large part, comes from the resilience they have developed as being children of military families.”
She continued, “They’ve watched their parents come and go in multiple deployments and experienced and overcome many challenges while they have bridged these gaps of absence.”
Collectively these girls have moved 162 times in their lives, and have supported their families through 132 major deployments around the world. One of them has moved 12 years of her lifetime; and she’s only 16.
Later in the evening at the Gala Dinner, Monique Villa, CEO of Thomson Reuters Foundation surprised each of the girls with new Apple iPads filled with educational apps – with the hope that this gift, and what comes from it over time, will help enable all of these remarkable young women to make their own unique contributions. Something that we call The Knowledge Effect.
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