SPEAK MENTORSHIP DEVELOPS A COMMUNITY OF DIVERSE LEADERS
Hetal Jani, the Founder and Executive Director of SPEAK Mentorship, works with immigrant high school students across the northeast with a distinct goal in mind: to empower young minds and to build stronger communities. She says, “My calling is to enable people to learn how to access and activate knowledge, identify opportunities, and develop skills and connections to pursue those opportunities”.
The non-profit organization, created in 2013 and formally established in 2015, has successfully conducted over 420 Mentoring sessions in the last year alone. Focused on raising the social and cultural capital of immigrant girls, they are actively looking to grow their footprint and expand across the country. The need to do so is urgent and apparent: the National Skills Coalition (2014) says “without immigrants, the workforce will be insufficient to replace retirees” by 2030.