The Power of The Mirrors

When I was nine, I played Hou Yifan, the top female chess player, during an all-girls chess event organized by Her Move Next. I still remember how it felt when she reached my board: the room seemed to tighten around sixty-four squares, and suddenly I was not just a kid playing chess. She was a mirror through which I saw who I could become.

Source: US Chess Federation

While I still love chess and proudly follow my teammates at Her Move Next as they continue breaking barriers, Her Funds was born out of another language I love: math.

I'm proud to be a Captain of the Stuyvesant Math Team, and I often say that I "speak math." For me, math is how I think and how I build. Naturally, I envision a career where this common language matters every day, and finance stood out as the place where I could apply math in the real world.

I found plenty of financial literacy programs, but I wanted something deeper: what a financial career looks like from the inside, and what it takes to thrive in it.

That is how I found the Charging Bull.

Source: New York Times

The statue is an intense symbol of Wall Street: dominance, pressure, power. But what stopped me wasn't the bull.

It was the Fearless Girl, four feet tall, fists on her hips, standing like she had every right to be there. Then I learned the artist of the Charging Bull argued that she was "attacking" the bull and fought to have her removed. I was horrified by what it symbolized: how often women's presence is treated as disruption instead of belonging.

That is why the logo representing my platform has two girls in front of a sitting bull, symbolizing girls' acceptance in this space.

I founded Her Funds to give girls the same mirror I saw in Hou Yifan: a version of themselves as successful women. Through virtual meetings with Her Move Next, we connect girls with high-powered women in finance and ask about the parts students don't usually hear: how they broke in, what their work looks like, and how they navigated pressure and bias without shrinking their ambitions. I also created a stock market simulation where members managed a virtual $100,000 portfolio.