First-year Isabel Whelchel was sitting in her Spanish class in Nicaragua when she first heard of a ‘hogar’ — a home for girls.
When Whelchel visited the home, she noticed the girls had resources to be successful businesspeople, but after they attended college, many ended up not working or on the streets.
Whelchel is now a youth ambassador for Agora Partnerships, a company that focuses on helping small businesses grow. With Agora’s help, Whelchel launched a campaign called 1000 Girls, 1000 Dreams and plans to raise money to help women entrepreneurs in Latin America, specifically Nicaragua, gain access to business services in order to help their businesses grow.
“I emailed Agora Partnerships to see if there was some way we could bridge the gap, and we figured the best way to help the girls (in the hogar) was to create a female role model in their community,” Whelchel said. “The idea of the campaign is that the woman who will receive the funding to take her business to the accelerator will be from Granada, Nicaragua, which is where the girls are from.”
Whelchel said women empower women, and she is now trying to raise $25,000 for one woman to receive funding to put her business in Agora’s program.
“By empowering one woman to have a company, she could go and employ so many women, and entire communities could end up shifting,” Whelchel said.
Elysa Neumann, communications manager at Agora Partnerships, said one woman named Aida was able to start a small sewing company that has grown to employ more than 50 women.
Neumann said entrepreneurship, as a whole, is vital for creating economic growth. Bringing economic development to communities has a longer-lasting impact than just infusing an area with money.
“I think what Isabel is doing is so important because of the fact that women in Latin America face additional barriers to being able to pursue opportunities like this,” Neumann said. “Women are actually shown to reinvest in their communities and their families at a higher rate than men, so by empowering a woman, you can create a greater net effect on a community.”
