Designing futures with the LES Girls Club

by Sarah Malachowsky and Bert O Phillips

On a recent Friday afternoon a group from SYPartners left work early and headed east, from Chelsea to the Lower East Side Girls Club on Avenue D.

The plan? Meet 25 high schoolers from the Girls as Activists, Leaders and Advocates (GALA) program and help them envision their future career paths.

When the Girls Club first asked us to plan a career workshop, we knew one thing for sure: Career paths, like any future state, are tough to predict. These girls will inevitably face countless unknowns. What could we — or anyone — know about the future they will one day inhabit? By any account, many of our roles at SYPartners—and many other roles we’d held before—weren’t around when we were kids.

What could we — or anyone — know about the future they will one day inhabit?

And yet, in our day jobs, we help our clients envision unknown futures all the time. Those clients are CMOs and CEOs and SVPs, but they are facing as much uncertainty and change as the rest of us. We knew we had to tap into that principle when working with the girls of GALA. So we designed a workshop where they could envision who they want to be and how they want to show up the world, no matter what that world will look like years from now — a powerful way to plan for an unknown future.

The Girls Club space is nothing short of inspiring. We walked by girls working on art projects and meditating, parents attending a learning session with their babies in tow, renowned artists from the community dropping in, and a makers space that would awe our creative technologists back at the office. It totally reframes what you might expect from a community center.

To get started, we helped the girls find some inspiration: One of the keys to helping someone see the future is simply showing them what’s out there. We used our own introductions as a way to do that. When our designers, strategists, and product developers explained what they do everyday, we saw a room full of eyes light up — and maybe even the excitement of a few potential futures begin to take shape.

One of the keys to helping someone see the future is simply showing them what’s out there.

Using inspiration as a springboard, we dove into our main exercise: helping the girls craft a customized vision for their future. Using worksheets we designed for them as thinking space, the girls could wrote, sketched, and dreamt their hypothetical future careers.

They mastered our Superpowers exercise to zero in on their particular strengths that might help them in choosing a career — systems thinking, grit, and problem solving are only a few of their inherent powers.

And they shared their futures with us. In small groups, we talked about their passions and strengths, their dreams and who they want to be in the world.

By the end of the session, it was humbling to see the clarity and intensity with which our partners could see their futures. One conversation revealed a detailed plan for becoming a successful parfumier. Another girl seemed to fully understand how her superpower would allow her to forge power networks and lead teams in the fashion industry. (It came as no surprise that her superpower was energy.)

As our team gathered to leave, our whole team was energized. The mood was buoyant — we were infused with renewed creativity, a boundless sense of possibility. No one wanted to leave.

What we learned is this: By any account imaginable, these girls understand the world they are entering far better than we could. They were deeply grounded in the challenges, but shared an infectious optimism about how they will change the world around them — from the neighborhood communities they are growing up in today, to the global communities they will touch as they grow older.

What more could you ask for from the leaders of tomorrow?