My time at Women On Top was one of the most enriching and fulfilling experiences of my life, and I will always be grateful to my supervisors and colleagues for inviting me into their work environment and creating such a supportive learning community for me. Throughout my time in Athens, I feel that I became a more educated and informed citizen of the world, and I left feeling more inspired, personally and professionally, to continue creating more change. I learned so much about the sociopolitical climate in Greece and Southern Europe surrounding gender issues and other issues and was able to witness the reality of these matters in person.
The main focus of my service and work this summer was the WHEN Hub, Greece’s first hub for women’s empowerment. In October, Women On Top will be opening a hub that offers coworking spaces and childcare for women. The hub will also host events, meetings, workshops, and more. While coworking spaces that offer childcare exist in other countries around the world, this will be the first establishment of its kind in Greece, emphasizing how revolutionary and essential the WHEN Hub and Women On Top’s efforts are. This hub has been a dream of Women On Top for years, and it is central to their mission of supporting migrant women, single mothers, women entering or reentering the workforce, and female entrepreneurs. Furthermore, much of the research that they have conducted indicates that the laws and culture surrounding paternity leave in Greece are one of the main influences that restrict women from working and flourishing in the professional sphere, even if they are not single mothers.
Since Women On Top was in its main preparatory stages during my time with them, the majority of my time was spent contributing to this planning. For example, I mapped other coworking spaces in Athens to create comprehensive recommendations for pricing models for coworking day passes, monthly memberships, meeting room rentals, event space rentals, and more. I also spent a significant amount of time researching coworking spaces in the United States and in Europe that offer childcare to provide recommendations on how to best structure combined booking for these two programs. I found this research extremely meaningful and am thankful that I had the opportunity to contribute to the foundations of this amazing hub. I was also able to be part of the team’s first ever visit to the building that the hub will be in, which was a very special moment. Women On Top has also launched a crowdfunding campaign to support renovations for the hub before its openings, so I was able to take part in planning the campaign as well.
Another one of my main projects this summer was researching and planning new workshops or training programs for the organization. Women On Top hosts various workshops that prepare women for the professional world, sometimes in collaboration with other companies or organizations in Greece. Most significantly, I researched and drafted a multi-session curriculum for a financial literacy program for teenage girls. Women On Top has financial literacy programming for women, but this training was catered towards younger girls specifically. The curriculum included important skills, a basic overview on investing and saving, and an explanation on why it is important to exercise these financial skills from a young age. Other workshop topics I created included digital skills in the workplace, how to create a personal brand on social media, technology tools for entrepreneurs, mentorship, online team building strategies, and more. These workshops are incredibly important for equipping women who are entering the workforce for the first time or for those who are joining after an extended break with the skills and confidence they need to thrive. Especially because Women On Top targets disadvantaged women, like lower income women, single mothers, and migrant women, this kind of information is highly valuable.
One of my most treasured memories from this summer was that I was able to attend an abbreviated version of one of these workshops. One of the directors and founders of Women On Top, who was also my main supervisor during this internship, gave a talk on sexual harassment in the workplace at a Career Day event hosted by the Coordination Center for Migrant and Refugee Issues in collaboration with various other organizations around the country. Most of the women who attended the event were from Cameroon or Congo, and the entire workshop had live translations into French for these women. I was struck by how engaged everyone was in the workshop and how intimate it felt, despite it being a room full of strangers. Although I felt that this was a topic I was highly educated in, I actually learned so much during the workshop as well. I also really felt how invested my supervisor was and how much this workshop meant to her as she led it—as someone really interested in continuing to do non-profit work, this was really inspiring to me.
Other research I conducted over the course of the summer included researching community building methods for the internal volunteer network within Women On Top and researching numerous expat communities in Greece that could potentially support the organization’s efforts or become new mentors by helping women in Greece interested in international work.
I also worked on researching the most effective methods for collecting feedback and evaluating impact for nonprofits. I delved into the differences between immediate and indirect impact and the importance of having concrete measures of impact for nonprofits, despite the fact that impact is often intangible. Another major project for me was completely editing the entire English website for the organization.
Finally, one of my favorite moments from this summer was attending one of Women On Top’s book club meetings. Women On Top hosts a book club called #StoRafi, open to women all around Greece, which chooses a book every month and meets to discuss it. In May, the chosen book was As Long as the Lemon Trees Bloom by Zoulfa Katouh. The book explores themes like war, dreams, and personal identity. This meeting in particular was special because the Ukrainian Women’s Union in Greece were featured as special guests. They led a very meaningful discussion about war and being a refugee. The meeting also displayed a photo exhibition of the VOTE WITH HER program, which is focused on supporting migrant women’s political participation and voting. It was incredibly special and personally impactful for me to have the opportunity to share a space with all of these women. The discussions were a beautiful mix of Greek and English, and even when I could not understand what was being said, I could feel the immense respect and admiration the women had for one another. I left the meeting feeling very hopeful and filled with love for how strong women are in creating community, even in a country that is foreign to them.
Overall, I cannot express how meaningful this experience has been for me. As a woman studying Gender Studies at Princeton and as someone very invested in pursuing work in gender issues in the future, this was a summer filled with emotions: anger, frustration, and shock, at times, but also, immense hope and inspiration.