Emily Teitsworth
Executive Director, GirlVentures
The Basics
Company Name: GirlVentures
Location: Based in Oakland, CA, and serving communities across Northern California
Founded: 1997
Full-Time Employees: 6
Products: Inspired and inspiring leaders and environmental advocates of today and tomorrow .
Social: Website * Instagram * Facebook
Claim to Fame: Our Leadership Progression Model, which supports and empowers girls and gender non-conforming youth from sixth grade through high school and beyond.
The Culture
The best thing about working here is:
Connecting and reconnecting to the outdoors, seeing youth grow up through our programs and come back as instructors, helping participants make connections between social justice and environmental justice, an organizational culture that supports self-care and community, and of course, great snacks.
When we’re not working, we’re:
Hiking, rock climbing, swimming, taking hammock naps, cooking, watching sports, hanging out with kids and pets.
What we’re reading:
Winners Take All, Seat of the Soul, Chronicles of Narnia, The Four Agreements, Women Who Run with Wolves, Hunger, Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
What we’re listening to:
A little bit of everything: Into the Wild, H.E.R., piano music, Nao, Chani Nicholas astrology playlists, 90s country hits, etc.
If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:
The Neon Vagina (our long-time office building boasts a four-foot tall neon sculpture of a vagina on the wall).
Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:
Inclusion is important in the outdoors because it communicates to all people that it is their birthright to have access to the resources that sustain us all at the most basic level, as well as provide us with an unconditional connection to healing, beauty and meaning. For too long many of us have been excluded from the outdoor narrative by a few of us. Representation matters and inclusion is essential because environmental justice is social justice.
Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:
For GirlVentures, we hope that we’ll be serving 1000 young people every year and supporting a thriving year-round community of instructors. For the outdoor industry, we hope that equity and radical inclusion will be the rule, rather than the exception.