I'm glad this sparked a discussion :) And I really appreciate people donating to Ashana's indiegogo! To add to a couple points: - Ashana and I definitely did

I'm glad this sparked a discussion :) And I really appreciate people donating to Ashana's indiegogo! To add to a couple points: - Ashana and I definitely did the majority of heavy-lifting, however I want to highlight that I was amazed by the amount of support I received from friends and the tech community. I've only been in SF 1.5 years and I don't have family out here. Friends + acquaintances stepped up big time to mentor her, tour her around their office and even give her internships while she was here. Ashana went to visit 30+ tech offices over the last few months. It sounds small, but exposing her to Google, Facebook, etc can have a big impact on what kids set as goals for themselves. An article cannot capture everything over the last 6 months, but trust me, a large number of people, including people I didn't know well, surprised me with how amazingly supportive they were. - Ashana is just one girl and there is a much broader issue that requires scalable changes. But, a) I want to give some credit to Big Brother Big Sisters for setting up this program. It does scale, and hopefully, our story and others like ours encourage more people to get involved as Bigs. b) One lesson this taught me is that people WILL step up to help if it is easy for them. E.g., if you say "help poverty", people don't know where to start. But if you say "my little sister needs some more mentors and I'm really busy at work, can you take her to Google for lunch next week?" Pretty much everyone says "yes" in my experience, because it is easy to do and the impact is more measurable. I truly believe (most) people want to do nice things if it is straight forward. --> I don't have a specific recommendation on how to scale that yet unfortunately, but I did find it to be interesting learning and wanted to share. I look forward to other thoughts people have - especially ones with suggestions on how to scale equalizing opportunity. -Felicia