Only 24% of C-suite executives are women. 94% of them played sports. Melyssa Jaskiewicz built Leveling the Fields on the space between those two numbers.
She goes into Charleston elementary schools and hands third through fifth grade girls a sport they have never tried. The program is called EmpowerPlay, and the clever part is who coaches it: the school's own teachers, hired and paid. The kids already know the hierarchy, so classroom management transfers for free, and the money lands in a teacher's pocket.
In South Carolina, twice as many boys play high school sports as girls. Melyssa's read is that this is a pipeline problem, not an interest problem. There is no youth program feeding the middle school feeding the high school, so the team never forms. The barrier for families is options and logistics, not desire.
She is also honest about the skill that did not transfer. Twenty years in sales, and asking a friend for money is still awkward: "We have a school on a wait list and we need $14,000 to pull that school off the wait list. Can you give me $100?" If you want to end that particular conversation, bring the program to a school or donate.
Diagnosed dyslexic and ADD in the 1980s, she makes a blunt argument about cutting PE: you cannot take kids with fast brains and expect them to sit still for eight hours. She has the before-and-after story of one disruptive student to back it up.
On AI, she is not generating graphics. She runs paid Claude and ChatGPT as collaborators for grant writing, pasted a thousand Instagram followers in to find collaboration targets, and has Claude clearing bounced email into HubSpot. Response time is a nonprofit's version of speed to lead, the thing Ignitvio measures in home services: she met a volunteer who waited nearly a year to hear back from a shelter. Her team answers in hours and staffed a volunteer manager to make sure of it. If you want to be one, they are taking volunteers and coaches.
Connect with Melyssa on LinkedIn. Leveling the Fields is @levelingthefields everywhere.
Read the full recap: https://unscriptednonprofit.com/melyssa-jaskiewicz-leveling-the-fields-girls-sports-pipeline/
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