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Sejal Hathi ’13: the young-girl network

By Mark Alden Branch ’86 | 9:30am March 07 2013

Just another story about someone who comes to Yale, starts a nonprofit, and wins an award? Not quite, if for no other reason that Sejal Hathi ’13 started Girls Helping Girls, a an international organization that connects groups of girls in the United States with those in the developing world, when she was still in high school. For her efforts, Hathi, a senior biology major, was recognized on Wednesday with a "Globechanger" award (for service by someone under 25) at the Jefferson Awards for public service in New York.

Based in Fremont, California, where Hathi founded the group when she was 15, Girls Helping Girls has, according to the award citation,

helped train and mentor thousands of girls worldwide to incubate entrepreneurial projects addressing needs in more than 20 countries. Girls Helping Girls strives not only to bridge international cultures, but, more profoundly, to channel the power harvested from the girls' collaborative service projects to Eradicate Poverty, Increase Access to Education, Improve Health, and Promote Peace.  Girls Helping Girls has spread to 12 U.S. cities, trained and mobilized over 30,000 girls worldwide and has raised over $50,000 to provide books, school supplies, scholarships, food and water to support girls’ basic education overseas.

Hathi is not the first Yale student to take away a Globechanger award. Just last year, violinist Jourdan Urbach ’12 was cited for his Concerts for a Cure, which at that time had raised $5.1 million for medical research. Hathi is a late bloomer compared to Urbach: he started his nonprofit when he was 7.

Filed under Sejal Hathi, Girls Helping Grils, Jefferson Awards
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