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.

Two statues, one square - and only one of them was ever asked to leave.

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.

Fearless Girl gets flowers and a superhero cape for International Women's Day.

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.

Taking my own stand on Wall Street.

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

Sophia with another fearless woman who guards The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Sophia standing with Fearless Girl at her new location, right outside the New York Stock Exchange.

Empty footprints where Fearless Girl once stood before she was moved aside, so the Bull could stand alone again.

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.