Advocates, Respect Role Models

Sejal Hathi

Advocate: Sejal Hathi, founder, CEO and executive director of Girls Helping Girls (and a high school student!)
Website: Empower A Girl
About: Sejal is a 16-year-old student at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, Calif. In her spare time, she loves writing, dancing, reading, playing with her dog Coco and spending time with family. She is currently preparing for a trip to Kolkata, India, where her organization will build a library for the daughters of commercial sex-trade workers.
Her mission: "We work to empower girls to create social change and build a movement of change makers."

Respect Rx: What inspired you to get into girl advocacy?
Sejal: I've always been really passionate about social change initiatives, but the one organization that really was the catalyst for my involvement with girl-related issues was Girls For A Change. When I joined Girls For A Change at the start of high school, I was really passionate and driven, but I still did not have that much direction. GFC revealed to me that any girl, however disadvantaged, can leverage her power to make a difference. The more social change projects I performed, the more I realized that the most fundamental problems affecting youth are not poverty or environmental degradation or political corruption. Rather, it was ignorance and the lack of a cosmopolitan cultivation amongst all youth that taught them that they do have a voice—they can be leaders for change. I desired to really work with the population that I thought was most vulnerable, most marginalized, most in need of love and empowerment: girls.

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