Our vision is to enable young adult women, especially those from 
marginalised communities, to have an active voice in choices related to their aspirations and lives.

Journeying from a small town, where you don’t have access to a quality education or role models  to help prepare you for life beyond the classroom, to a career isn’t easy. The Esther fellowship is designed to give the resources and the relationships to enable women to pursue their career aspirations.

The Esther Fellowship is an immersive 5 month program to put women on an accelerated trajectory to be workforce ready and streamline their job discovery process.  We arrived at our model after learning from our pilots. Our fellowship is deployed in partnership with colleges to enroll women students in their final year of college.

Women flourish when they are planted in a supportive community of like-minded peers, and our design facilitates local college student hubs, virtual hubs with mentors and a community with students across states who are currently enrolled in or graduated from the Esther program.

There are 4 verticals to our program:

Eventually, we plan to build a platform to democratize access to mentors, resources and job opportunities, specifically for women students from peri-urban areas across India.

In 2021, we spent time with students from colleges across Tirunelveli in collaboration with Bodhi Tree Foundation.  We used start-up and design thinking pedagogies that the founding team learned at ISDM, Stanford Business School and Stanford Design School.

We followed the design thinking process, and conducted user interviews (framed with human centered design thinking) with women college students at that time, and learned about how women students were excited about owning a smartphone, gaining internet access and learning through virtual modes of instruction. We used these insights to run three pilots. The second wave in India and continued impact of COVID-19 on colleges in peri-urban areas provided. continued validation of our solution in a post COVID-19 scenario.

hours of purposeful conversations with a mentor akka

of students report high confidence in pursuing their career goals after going through
the Esther Fellowship

women created their resumes and LinkedIn profile for the first time as part of the
Esther Fellowship

of participants have interviewed for roles by leveraging the interview skills they learned through the
Esther Fellowship

Over the next few years, our vision is to expand our reach to many more women in tier 2 and tier 3 towns of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka.

The narrative about women from small towns will no longer be that they don’t know where to find information, that they don’t have networks and mentorship, or that they’re not good enough to crack interviews/land the job that they want. 

We believe the work we’re doing at Esther is creating ripples towards a future where women have access to support, community, and resources to carve out opportunities for themselves, and pursue their career aspirations without being held back by their circumstances.