She is 24 years old. She is young, energetic, and ambitious. She has her feet on the ground and head in the sky. She lives in the city of Hyderabad nearly 15,000 kms from her family and friends. She graduated less than 2 years ago and already has her platter full of challenges. To begin with, she is a Field Manager for IDEX Fellowship Program and ably guides a group of 35 young professionals who have desires in their hearts, dreams in their eyes and want to make it big. She is also a co-founder and Business Development Manager of a non–profit, VOICE 4 Girls.

She is Allison Gross.

Born and brought up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Allison completed her graduation in Business Administration from Emory University in the year 2010. That very year in August, IDEX fellowship program launched by Oglethorpe University and Gray Matters Capital (GMC) was being piloted with an initial count of 11 fellows. Having already worked for GMC as a Marketing and Communications intern during her college for 6 months, she was offered an opportunity to be a part of IDEX. She latched onto the same not knowing that this is just the beginning of something much bigger.

As destiny would have it, that was the beginning of a partnership among the three budding social entrepreneurs and gender equality advocates – Averil Spencer, Ilana Shushansky and Allison Gross.

The first year of fellowship with IDEX changed their lives and in return has altered and will bring an alteration to lives of hundreds and thousands of girls and young women. The gloomy picture of numerous under privileged girls who are being discriminated on the basis of gender and social pressures gave them a reason, a cause to live for and fight for.

 “As we visited schools, every girls had so many questions around changes in their bodies, health, and safety, and many confided in us their concerns about family support for their future dreams.  We knew we had to do something to raise the Voices of these girls and give them the tools to be strong, independent women.” ~ Allison Gross

They were getting ready to take their chances and were calculating the possibilities to undertake something new.

Now, with the pilot being a success, Nike Foundation has agreed to provide an additional grant this year. Also, as the footprints and size of VOICE 4 Girls are bound to grow, the need of managing it efficiently is enormous. The VOICE Team, Averil, Allie, and Ilana plan to reach 3600 girls during May 2012 across 110 schools and to reach 100,000 girls by 2016.

Thus, VOICE, as the name suggests, has become an expression of many underprivileged girls who wish to make a mark of their own, but unluckily have no resource at their disposal to find their way to success. VOICE 4 Girls has done it for these girls earlier and shall keep on doing it for them in the future.

The dream Allie and her two fellow colleagues started, is surely getting converted into a reality, gradually and steadily.

Allison at Ms. Lohia's Little Angels School in Hyderabad

We were recently asked by some of our 5 for Fairness Team Members  who VOICE ‘s influential supporters are and why? 

Over the past year we have received support and advice from various individuals and institutions. While the girls and the school owners have given us some incredible feedback on the structure of the program and types of activities they want to see more of, still our largest and most influential supporter in every sense has been the Nike Girl Effect Campaign.

They took a gamble on the three of us, and gave us funds to support our entire pilot, and from the day of entering that partnership, they have also continuously pushed us to think bigger and push harder.

Back in November, we had the opportunity to sit down for a days long meeting and brainstorm with our Nike representative as well as some other highly experienced social enterprise professionals, and those conversations completely shifted the way I was thinking about business operations and expansion.

Nike pushed us to think about a model that could reach a million girls, and got us to start thinking about what we can do outside of summer camps.

They also prompted us to start thinking about the impacts outside of the change in campers, and we’ve come to really think about our impact in terms of teacher and counselor improvement.

Right now, VOICE is really in transition from a project to an organization, and we could never be where we are at without the inspiration and encouragement of Girl Effect and our other amazing supporters!

Co-Founder

Allison Gross

Manal, counselor from Camp VOICE 2011.

Manal Omer is one of the amazing counselors that helped get Camp VOICE off the ground this past summer. She is currently completing her final year at Shadan Women’s College in Hyderabad, India and has been excepted to work with Microsoft after graduation.

We caught back up with Manal and asked her to talk about how Camp VOICE impacted her last summer. Her story is below: 

It was my first day at the camp  and as I entered IQRA MISSION HIGH SCHOOL I found little girls playing on the grounds. They all were almost half an hour early to the camp! I was quiet nervous actually. But little did I know that  these little girls are going to change me in ways I never thought I would and they were no ordinary girls.

At the end of that day, a group of girls from 7^th class came up to me and said “ We’re glad to have you as our counselor.”

That one statement made me realize that this was not just a summer camp for these girls , it was an opportunity for them to be something. To do something they were always told they could not!

At first, none of them would speak up. These girls were brought up in families where every minute they were told that “girls aren’t supposed to raise their voices or talk loudly”.  I knew that because I was brought up the same way.

My first move was to make the girls realize that my family had almost the same thinking as their family. Initially it was only me sharing my stories. However, as the days passed by I couldn’t get the girls to keep quiet.

It was so amazing seeing all of them glow when they knew the answer to something or when they had something to share.

I still remember the day clearly when we took the girls to Deloitte for a field trip. As we entered Banjara Hills all the girls were staring out of the windows and when they saw City Centre they went stunned. “WOOOOOWW” one of them said as she explained this was the first time she’d ever seen such tall buildings.

Visiting Deloitte in Hi Tech City  was an amazing experience. The girls had so many questions! Questions even I wouldn’t come up with.  After visiting Hi Tech City  more girls started coming up to me asking career related questions like “what do I have to do to become an engineer like my brother.”

As the camp was coming to an end,  I had many parents tell me how they could see the changes in their daughters. They told me how their daughters were already excited for next year’s camp.

The biggest take away for cap for me was when some of the girls came up and told me that they want to be like me someday.  They said they wanted to be a computer engineers and teach girls just the way I taught them.

That conversation was definitely the best part of the camp for me.  I didn’t know that duration of one month was enough to get someone thinking about what they want to do with their lives.  It amazed me that their ideas and dreams had been jump started.

Camp VOICE was more than me teaching the girls something. They  were  teaching me so much!

It would be completely accurate to say that camp changed the lives of so many girls last summer

I was one among them.

10×10 is a campaign to reach global audiences and inspire individuals to take action for girls. Stories about the power of educating girls are told every day through photos, videos, blogs, books, and sometimes in 140 characters or less.

Educated girls dramatically improve the well-being of their families, their communities, and their countries—multiplying the impact on society.
Educating girls will…
reduce poverty
reduce child mortality
reduce population growth
reduce HIV infection rateschange the conditions that lead to terrorism
reduce corruption

To learn more visit 10 x 10 Educate Girls: Change the World Website