Water Mill Resident Featured in Forbes 50 Over 50 Impact List

In 2006, Water Mill resident Linda Latsko-Lockhart had a vision of empowering at risk-adolescent girls in Kenya by introducing them to opportunities in the Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture and Math (STEAM) fields, while simultaneously helping them give back to their own communities.

Now, her organization, Global Give Back Circle, has paired more than 4,000 high schoolers with educational programming and both local and long distance mentoring, and has expanded to support adolescent girls in Rwanda, South Africa, China, Uganda, Ghana, and India.

For her work and dedication to empowering disadvantaged girls around the world, Ms. Latsko-Lockhart was featured in the first ever Forbes 50 Over 50 Impact List — a partnership between the Forbes “50 Over 50” platform, and Mika Brzezinski’s “Know Your Value,” which showcases women over 50 years old who are leaving a positive and lasting impact on the world.

Ms. Latsko-Lockhart was living in Paris, and was in international consulting before she decided to chase after what she cited as a needed “purpose” in her life. Through her experience working with banks in Africa, she learned that young women living in developing countries face an extraordinary number of challenges and hurdles preventing them from expanding their education beyond their high school years.

“When I thought about what I might be able to do to make a difference, I thought about mentoring,” Ms. Latsko-Lockhart said. “I’ve had some great mentors in my own life, so I know first-hand that mentoring has the potential to change lives.”

Global Give Back Circle works with partner high schools and pairs volunteer mentors with mentees from marginalized backgrounds — like those who live in the Kabira slum in Kenya, or were born into communities without electricity or running water — to help provide the adolescent girls with skills, confidence, and networks to succeed in the workforce.

“A lot of the very rural areas practice harmful cultural practices against women, so those are the girls that we want to mentor because we want to open their eyes to the choices that they have in life,” Ms. Latsko-Lockhart said.

Though the organization started as just a mentoring program, Ms. Latsko-Lockhart ultimately decided that Global Give Back Circle needed to be more than a mentoring program, but had to provide scholarships, internships, and workforce readiness skills in order for the young women to reach economic empowerment.

“Once we reached a certain point, we realized that though mentoring was great and it was certainly helping the girls, unless we were able to help these adolescent girls who were now 17 or 18 years old past their high school graduation and give them some other skills that would allow them to leap into the workforce and gain employment, they were going to go right back into the circle of poverty that they came from,” Ms. Latsko-Lockhart said.

So Ms. Latsko-Lockhart launched ‘Her Lab’ — a post-secondary school, 6-month program that gives girls access to bridge-to-employment opportunities by teaching leadership, digital literacy, coding, financial literacy, agriculture, and more.

While at first, Ms. Latsko-Lockhart had to recruit friends to volunteer, Global Give Back Circle now has over 1,800 mentors globally, and around 90 percent of those mentors are affiliated with large private sector organizations like Microsoft, Google, SAP, KPMG, and Intel.

“The mentors are now mostly from private sector organizations that are passionate about having women employees involved in meaningful employee volunteerism,” Ms. Latsko-Lockhart said. “About 30 percent of mentors are local in-country mentors like employee volunteers at Microsoft in Nairobi, Kenya.”

While the organization first started with 10 mentees, they are now working with over 4,000 across the world. But Ms. Latsko-Lockhart explained that the impact organization reaches far more lives than just those 4,000, as an essential part of the mission of Global Give Back Circle is to encourage the girls to give back to their own communities.

“The reason that we’re called Global Give Back Circle is because the only thing we ask from any girl in the program is the day she enters the program that she commits to a serious giveback project in her local community, whether that's teaching other girls in her community about reproductive health or helping her community understand irrigation and how it works,” she said. “The impact of us helping one girl multiplies because she then lifts her family, her friends, and her whole community.”

Today, 16 years after its launch, Global Give Back Circle is run by a team of alumni in Nairobi who took the reins and now run and operate the program in Kenya themselves, Ms. Latsko-Lockhart said.

“When you empower these young women to run things themselves, they think with an innovation that sometimes adults don’t possess,” she said. “They have really stepped up, and Global Give Back Circle is thriving thanks to them.”

While the alumni have taken on the role of running and managing the program in Kenya, Ms. Latsko-Lockhart has shifted her focus to networking in order to help the team find more partner organizations, storytelling to share the organization with the world, and coaching the team in Kenya on how to be sustainable and continue to grow Global Give Back Circle.

In addition to helping the adolescent girls shift their mindset from one of “marginalization to one of economic empowerment,” the mentoring process has created long-lasting relationships and deeply touched the lives of those who volunteer to be mentors.

Mentor and Wainscott resident Marie-Eve Berty was introduced to Ms. Latsko-Lockhart at a friend’s house, and says they immediately sparked a friendship when Ms. Latsko-Lockhart began telling her about Global Give Back Circle.

“At some point, she suggested I come to Kenya to see how it all works,” Ms. Berty said. “I was on a one week trip to Kenya where I saw the graduating class of 2019 and so I saw these young ladies discussing in a very articulate way how Global Give Back Circle had changed their lives — it was very moving.”

After witnessing first person how Global Give Back Circle was impacting the lives of many young women in Kenya, Ms. Berty volunteered to be a mentor and has been mentoring Esther, who is in her first year of college and working to become a doctor, for the past two years.

“I’ve been able to see her blossom,” Ms. Berty said. “Her growth, and her willingness to persevere despite the challenges she faces, has truly been incredible to watch.”

Ms. Berty said just as she tries to share her knowledge and advice with her mentee, she has also learned a great deal from Esther, and the relationship has left a lasting impact on her life.

“The interesting thing is in every relationship you engage in, it’s not all giving or all taking, It's an exchange,” Ms. Berty said. “I share stories from my life in the States and she shares stories about hers in Kenya, we talk about the similarities and differences, and what is going on in our lives.”

Another mentor and Sag Harbor resident is Christina Lindstrom, who began mentoring a young girl named Naomi four years ago when she was in her second to last year of high school in Kenya. Naomi is now in her second year at university in Nairobi studying urban design.

Ms. Lindstrom recalled that right off the bat, Naomi was very open about sharing parts of her life with Ms. Lindstrom, and asking her for advice. Since then, the two have shared more about their lives, sending email exchanges back and forth regularly and keeping each other updated with their life events.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for teenage girls,” Ms. Lindstrom said. “It has been so much fun to get to know Naomi, to talk to her and see what her ambitions are. Watching her grow, and seeing her succeed as the wonderful, intelligent and hardworking girl that she is has given me a great deal of enjoyment and pride.”

Ms. Latsko-Lockhart said that as the organization continues to grow, she hopes to expand deeper into East Africa and Ghana, while also engaging more and more private sector organizations

“When I think about what we need to do for the future and to continue to grow, I think about partnerships,” she said. “How can we partner with a private sector organization that values the partnership because of the way we engage their women employees in something that is important to society as a whole?”