When Jeanette joined the first ABURY Girls Gearing Up Academy in 2025 as a mentor, she brought with her years of professional and leadership experience. But her decision to become a mentor was rooted in something much more personal.
As a mother of two daughters, she had been thinking about how she could use everything she had learned over the years to make a meaningful difference in the lives of young women.
“I chose to mentor girls because I’m a mother of two, and to be honest I do miss that role of mentorship, so it led me to think about where I can make an impact in the world today with the experience that I have acquired over the years. So when I was approached by ABURY and later on Girls Gearing Up, I found it to be an interesting and exciting opportunity to do so.”
For Jeanette, mentoring is not about having all the answers. And it is certainly not about telling a young woman who she should become.
It is about helping her discover what is already there.
Creating Space for Self-Discovery
Ask Jeanette what she loves most about mentoring and she doesn’t talk about giving advice or sharing her own experience. She talks about watching young women begin to understand themselves.
“What I really love when mentoring is seeing how these girls slowly start to go inward to discovering who they are, what they like, what are their talents and strengths and what they’re capable of doing with all of it.”
It is a simple idea, but an important one.
Young women grow up surrounded by expectations – about who they should be, what they should achieve and which paths they should follow. Having someone who takes the time to listen, ask questions and encourage them to look inward can create something very different: the space to form their own ideas about who they are and where they want to go.
This is also what mentorship within the ABURY Girls Gearing Up Academy is about.
The Academy brings together young women from different countries, cultures and backgrounds. Their realities may look very different, but the idea behind mentorship remains the same: not to define the path for them, but to support them as they find their own.
Learning to Trust Yourself – Even When Things Don’t Go to Plan
Part of finding your own path is learning what happens when it doesn’t unfold exactly as expected.
For Jeanette, one quality is particularly important here: resilience.
“Resilience is what shapes any woman in today’s society… women are very resilient and they know how to learn and become better and accept rejection and perceive defeat. From my experience they are much better at doing so than young men at the same age or experience.”
Setbacks, rejection and uncertainty are part of growing up – and of almost every path that comes afterwards. Mentorship cannot remove those experiences. But it can give a young woman someone to talk them through with, help her put them into perspective and remind her that one setback does not determine what she is capable of.
Confidence, after all, is not about knowing that everything will work out exactly as planned. It is about developing enough trust in yourself to continue when it doesn’t.
“Change Has to Come From Within”
There is one thought that sits at the heart of Jeanette’s approach to mentorship:
“Change has to come within, it cannot come from the outside.”
For her, empowerment begins with recognising your own abilities and understanding that you can play an active role in shaping your future.
But that doesn’t mean every young woman faces the same circumstances – or that empowerment looks the same everywhere.
The girls who participate in the ABURY Girls Gearing Up Academy come from very different cultural and social environments. Jeanette believes meaningful mentorship has to acknowledge those realities rather than impose one idea of what progress or success should look like.
“Sometimes our job is not to shift the culture but to ensure that girls are able to access opportunities within the culture that they live and exist in. That is definitely going to look different in every country, region, and continent.”
Perhaps that is one of the most important skills a mentor can bring: the ability to listen before offering advice.
To understand the person in front of you, the environment she is navigating and what she wants for her future.
Because mentorship is not about creating one definition of a strong, successful woman. It is about helping each young woman discover what that definition means for herself.
The Advice She Would Give Her Younger Self
There is another perspective Jeanette brings to mentorship: the ability to look back.
Years of professional experience, leadership and motherhood mean she can now see some of the pressures and uncertainties of being young differently than she might have at the time.
So what would she say if the young woman sitting across from her were her younger self?
“If I were to mentor my younger self I would tell her one thing: take it easy and relax into life because there’s no need to be that harsh on yourself. Just have faith in yourself and that it’s all going to be just fine.”
Maybe that is also what makes mentorship so powerful.
We cannot go back and give our younger selves the reassurance, perspective or encouragement we might have needed. But we can offer some of it to the generation coming after us.
And sometimes, knowing that someone sees your potential – especially at a moment when you cannot quite see it yourself – can make all the difference.
Mentorship Beyond the Academy
At the ABURY Girls Gearing Up Academy, mentorship does not end when the Academy week is over.
Each participant is matched with a mentor who accompanies her for 12 months, connecting with her regularly to talk through ideas and challenges, explore opportunities and support her as she takes her next steps.
It means that the conversations started during the Academy can continue long after everyone has returned home.
Mentors like Jeanette bring their own experiences, perspectives and lessons learned. But perhaps their most important role is not to show a young woman which path to take.
It is to help her trust herself enough to choose her own.
By supporting the ABURY Girls Gearing Up Academy, you help make these experiences – and long-term mentorship relationships – accessible to more young women around the world.
Through donations, partnerships or simply by sharing our work, you can help us create more spaces in which girls are encouraged to discover their strengths, trust their own voices and imagine what might be possible for them.
Because sometimes, before you can step into your own strength, it helps to have someone who already sees it in you.
