Girls as CEOs
Compelled to advance 30 years of making a difference in the lives of girls of color, in 2014, with the help of dedicated staff, knowledgeable instructors and a historic partnership with Morgan State University’s Earl Graves School of Business, the Mischa Toland* Entrepreneurial Academy for Girls opened as a 28-week non-traditional learning experience designed to support the social and emotional intellectual development of the next generation of innovators, world changers and entrepreneurs by confronting their fears and nurturing their ideas. Understanding the need to create a sustainable infrastructure for the Academy’s valuable work, in 2015, I then founded GIRLS as CEOs Foundation; a non-profit organization dedicated to addressing as well as eradicating inequity by elevating excellence for girls of color through education, mentoring and philanthropy. With three years of incredible success, The Mischa Toland* Entrepreneurial Academy for Girls served its last cohort of girls in 2017 for the reason that I relocated to California where it is my desire to establish a viable West Coast partnership that will allow the Entrepreneurial Academy to reopen. In the interim, this page provides a glimpse of some of my beautiful work with girls. After decades of standing before audiences of girls, the sense of obligation I feel to be a light, an answer, or a source of hope never changes.
* Toland is Mischa’s former marital name. She no longer uses it.
Horace Howard Furness High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
"The measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls."
MICHELLE OBAMA
Rising Young Women Professional Conference
Baltimore, Maryland
With the amazing support of more than 20 volunteers and 13 incredible sponsors, our October 2016 inaugural professional conference for 11th and 12th grade girls of color was a huge success. We reached our 150 participant capacity in less than 30 days. We proudly hosted girls from Baltimore City Public Schools and schools from surrounding counties throughout Maryland. Because of our phenomenal keynote speaker, Cheryl Grace, and 15 awesome workshop presenters, two of whom traveled from Atlanta and Chicago, our girls left with a wealth of insight, new perspective and even bigger dreams for their lives. Below is the THANK YOU card we sent out featuring some of the two-day conference highlights.
