Our mission is to equip awardees with the tools and resources they need to achieve their professional dreams. Who better, then, to tell us how to prioritize our program growth and enhancements?

In June 2020 we held a series of focus groups with awardees. This report summarizes their feedback and identifies their highest priorities. We’ll partner with donors to grow our financial support so we’re positioned to address them.

Our financial support reduces debt, creates pathways to opportunities, and fills gaps left by other aid. Awardees recounted how college visits and textbooks could have been out of reach in the absence of the travel stipend, and that the award itself helped them study abroad, pay for a semester of classes, and reach their academic and life goals more easily.

Four of the five highest-ranked priorities awardees identified for future investment were related to financial support. Simply put, the money matters. We’ll strengthen our support by:

• Increasing the number of toiletry kits and care packages delivered annually

• Making sure our emergency fund remains available and funded

• Increasing the value of the graduation gift

• Exploring whether we can offer a personal investment account as an alternative graduation gift

Awardees also welcome an increase in their $2,000 award. We’ll continue to work with individual donors, corporations, and organizations to make this a reality.

Each awardee is paired with a mentor who is a personal, social, and emotional source of support. Awardees also benefit from tapping into other mentors within the community and peer-to-peer understanding and advice.

Awardees desire deeper connections and deeper self-exploration. We’ll strengthen our support in this area by:

• Hosting more frequent casual events to foster relationships within and across cohorts

• Adding programming focused on personal insight and growth

Awardees spoke about how our support helped them build a budget or avoid debt and created a sense of peace of mind, control, and stability. In our 2018 report, we listed developing a lifecycle-based curriculum as one of our major goals. Since then we’ve designed a series of college financial fit workshops for an awardee’s first program year and established other group workshops and individual meetings for older awardees.

Awardees want to be prepared for their future and the opportunity to talk about their specific situation. We’ll strengthen our support in this area by:

• Delivering content in smaller, personalized cohort sessions

• Adding workshops to address job-related content and personal finance goals

• Seeking partners to help us expand our curriculum

Awardees value the learning opportunities they engage in, from the summer retreat to the more casual interactions with women more experienced than themselves. They were less familiar with some of the professional and career support we offer, such as our partnership with Hello Possible!, a boutique resume and interview coaching firm.

Our awardees want to understand what it takes to succeed in their chosen profession and develop the skills and network necessary to pave the way. We’ll strengthen our support in this area by:

• Improving our model for communicating about available resume and interview support

• Building a Girls with Grit database of volunteers and partners who’ll host job shadowing sessions, conduct informational interviews, and provide other information and access

• Creating a directory to permit easier tapping into the JMBA community

• Including career workshops in our financial empowerment curriculum

When we began, the Jill Melmed-Buzzeo Award consisted of a financial award and mentoring. We agree with awardees that today, we’re much more than this. They believe our tagline, “Girls with Grit,” should be the name of our organization because it better encapsulates who we serve, how they see themselves, and what they value in our program. We agree. Say hello to Girls with Grit!

Over the months ahead you’ll see us start to change to Girls with Grit on our website, our newsletter, our logo. It’s important to emphasize we’ll be rebranding for our future while respecting and retaining our past. Awardees want to see the woman who inspired our mission and focus remain a prominent part of our organization. Going forward, the Jill Melmed-Buzzeo Award will be used to refer to the direct financial support each awardee receives, while Girls with Grit will refer to the community and program.