The Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) is a global women’s empowerment program that has made a powerful impact - but until recently AWE’s story had gone untold. Launched by the U.S. Department of State in 2019, AWE has helped empower 25,000 women in nearly 100 countries with U.S.-based business learning, and facilitation and mentoring by local business leaders and ExchangeAlumni of U.S. government-sponsored programs like Fulbright and Young Leaders programs. Yet AWE’s small team of three in Washington D.C. lacked the bandwidth to capture the countless stories of how this program impacts women’s lives - until now.
To harness the power of storytelling, AWE took on a team of three Virtual Student Federal Service (VSFS) interns in 2022 to drive the program’s communications outreach initiatives, and they are finding the voice to tell the inspiring stories of women entrepreneurs from around the world.
Storytelling is a powerful tool. According to the Harvard Business Review, whether leading a business or a government, a key part of leadership is knowing how to inspire people and influence their emotions in ways that create connections that move individuals to imagine, wonder, and act – which can persuasively be done through storytelling. The article goes on to quote internationally acclaimed storyteller and screenwriter Robert McKee on the human need to tell stories. “Stories fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living,” said McKee, “not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.”
Telling stories about personal emotional experiences is a critical part of modern public diplomacy, a statecraft wholly dedicated to expanding and strengthening the relationships between the people of the United States and citizens of other countries. Through an exchange of stories, experiences and ideas, U.S. diplomats advance national interests by seeking to engage, inform, and understand the perspectives of foreign audiences around the world.
AWE’s VSFS intern-led communications team is supporting this mission by telling powerful stories of individual women who graduate from the AWE program. In addition to filling a unique editorial role on the communications team, each intern writes one feature story about an AWE alumni every week, covering a wide range of AWE businesses from tech startups on Taiwan to helping women become bankable in Zimbabwe to an award-winning kiwi-fruit winery in India.
AWE’s Lead Editor, Roni Kane, is a first-year VSFS intern and a junior at the University of Michigan who is studying International Studies and Film, TV and Media. With a background in journalism as a reporter and editor for The Michigan Daily, she has helped bring scores of articles to print, while also establishing an editorial style guide to standardize the team’s writing style.
“From the connections I've made with the other interns and AWE leadership to my published pieces on the [ECA] website, I certainly have gotten out as much as I have put in,” Kane said. “Being able to apply my passion for journalism and female empowerment to a professional public service opportunity has been amazing.” To date, Kane has helped the team publish nearly 40 stories on ECA’s website, which have been republished by U.S. government media platforms like ShareAmerica and amplified by local press outlets around the world - global coverage the interns are also tracking.
As a third-year student at University College London who is studying History and Politics of the Americas, Naomi Hampton is utilizing her expertise in research and analytics as AWE’s Data Analytics Lead. She recently discovered that an article on the AWE Summit in Malaysia garnered more than 20 million views. Based on statistics from ShareAmerica and Thunderbird School of Global Management, Hampton estimates AWE stories have reached tens of millions of readers in more than 24 countries.
“My love for data really arose from interning in the State Department,” Hampton said, referring to her prior internship with the U.S. Speakers Program in 2021. “My position with AWE has pushed me to be creative in data collection tactics in order to gather as much data as easily as possible and be clear and concise in how I present it to others.”
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