Small, local organization thinks big on girls’ education

What started out as a simple call to action during a University of Washington study-abroad trip resulted in the creation of a local nonprofit organization with humble intentions for girls in India.

Girl In Yellow (GIY) is a nonprofit organization that raises money to help support girls’ education in rural areas of India, where public education is only provided by the state until age 14. According to the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the literacy rate of women in India was 67 percent in 2012.

GIY founder Kurt Ricketts was motivated to create the organization after visiting India in 2013 for a study-abroad exploration seminar while attending UW. The trip focused on women’s leadership and social entrepreneurship, but for Ricketts, this was the beginning of a mission to make a difference.

The search for the girl in yellow

Ricketts lives in Fremont and works full-time for Society Consulting at Microsoft as a business analyst; he’s also an Uber driver on the side. Despite his demanding schedule, he said he always has time in the day for GIY.

While in India, Ricketts attended a meeting with members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) to learn about their lives. SEWA is a union that supports Indian women who work in low-income trade industries such as garment-stitching and waste-picking. In 2014, SEWA had more than 1.9 million members across India.

“That’s where the idea for Girl in Yellow came from, that in this meeting there were actually a bunch of younger girls also and it turned out that they were actually working as well, but we were thinking, ‘They’re so young; they should be in school,” Ricketts explained.

After speaking with the girls, Ricketts learned that most of them stopped attending school because their families couldn’t afford it and they had to work to help support their families.

“Then the question is how much does it cost a year?” Ricketts said, and that question is what unfolded the chain of events that would lead to GIY’s formation.

Ricketts found that the amount of money needed to pay for one year’s worth of tuition was about as much as he had in his pocket to spend for that week. Between $250 and $350 fully pays for a year’s worth of tuition, books and testing material. That is equivalent to what a garment stitcher in India may make in a year.

“The girls that we’re supporting now, their mothers who are working as garment stitchers or waste pickers or what have you, are making max a 100 rupees a day,” Ricketts said. “To put that into perspective, 60 rupees is $1, so they’re making less than $2 a day at the most, and some of them are making 50 rupees a day, so less than a dollar a day.”

During the meeting, one of the girls left a profound impact on Ricketts.

“She longed to go to school — you could see it in her face and her eyes,” Ricketts said. “She spoke in Hindi so she had to be translated, but you could see it.”

For three days after meeting her, the girl in yellow was the last thing he thought about at night and the first thought in his mind in the morning. Finally, he approached his professor and told her he wanted to pay for her schooling out of his own pocket.

In the absence of a name, she came to be known as the girl in yellow. Eventually, with SEWA’s help, they located her three months later, but by then, it was too late — she had already been forced into marriage.

“I really do attribute that moment in my life to changing the course of my direction of where I was going,” he said.

GIY initially began as a UW student organization and then expanded into a foundation that operated independently as an extension of Child United, another nonprofit organization. Currently, GIY is still fiscally sponsored by Child United, but it became incorporated in January. It has also begun the process of becoming its own nonprofit which is expected to be complete in six months.

GIY now helps support five girls in India, with five more girls being added this coming school year.

Globalizing GIY

As part of GIY’s recent incorporation, Ricketts appointed a board. Mahvish Gazipura is one of the board members Ricketts appointed. Gazipura works at Amazon in business development on the global expansion team. She’s from Pakistan and is one of the only people in her extended family to have an education. She lives in Seattle, where she met Ricketts.

“I met Kurt in an Uber [ride], and he said, ‘Girls, education, India,’ and I just thought yes,” she said.

Gazipura then connected Ricketts with Purvi Gandhi. Gandhi moved to the United States from India as a young girl with her family. At the time, her parents decided that their children needed to get a good education.

“I went on to graduate from [University of California,] Berkeley and had a generally successful corporate life. I was CFO at a very early age of a very large Pan-Asia private equity group,” she said. “Then, through the years, I was involved in Silicon Valley venture capital, and then I moved to Seattle to work with the hedge fund.”

After meeting with Ricketts, Gandhi said she was moved by his philanthropy and decided she would also become a board member.

“Meeting a simple human being like Kurt, who is not a billionaire or a millionaire or who doesn’t need tax shelters to run a nonprofit, which a lot of wealthy people do — he just wanted to get out there and do whatever he could, initially with his little dollar, then bigger, and now he wants to scale it,” Gandhi said.

Together, the three have brainstormed ways to scale and globalize the organization. GIY eventually wants to not only help support girls in India but all across the globe through partnerships with other nonprofits. There are also talks of sustainability becoming a short-term goal rather than a long-term one, by selling GIY-branded products.

“What we see doing over the next two years is plugging deeper into the local ecosystem in Seattle and finding a way to motivate and activate that micro-philanthropy,” Gandhi said. “So we want to be able to tell everybody like you and I out there that you don’t need to be a multimillionaire or a billionaire. You have the ability, the power to make the change simply on very small tasks.”

Dancing for a cause

This month marks the foundation's two-year anniversary, which will be celebrated with a night of dancing on Friday, Feb. 26, at Club Contour (801 First Ave.) in Downtown Seattle. All the proceeds from the door entrance fee will go to GIY, and if the bar exceeds $1,000 in sales, then 10 percent of those sales will be donated as well.

The benefit is put on through a partnership between GIY and a local DJ coalition, Seattle Psy Ops. The performers are all female DJs, including Khromata and Nancy Dru.

As one of the event organizers and a performing DJ herself, Lara Schneider proposed the idea for a benefit show after Ricketts had spoken with her about his newly formed foundation. Last year’s benefit raised enough money to support three girls.

“Rather than having an expensive auction or something that people from all walks of life can’t access, this is completely accessible — anyone can come,” Schneider said.

The event is for people 21 and older.

For more information about the event, visit its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/events/1545934672390120.

To learn more about the Girl In Yellow foundation or to make donations, visit girlinyellow.org.

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