From first sportto lasting leadership.
A girl does not need one intervention. She needs the pipeline to still be open every time she reaches the next stage of it — at seven, at thirteen, at nineteen, at thirty. This is the model we use to make sure it is, and the honest account of which parts of it we have built so far.
How to read the model
Two frameworks, and they are not the same thing.
We use two sets of language and it is worth separating them plainly, because most of the confusion about what this Foundation does comes from mixing them up.
Who is in front of us
An audience lifecycle. Awareness and Early Engagement, Identity and Growth, Transition to Purpose, Legacy and Leadership. These describe a person at a point in her life, and the girl in stage one has nothing in common with the woman in stage four except the thing that connects them.
What we do about it
Access, Retention, Leverage. These describe our job, not her age. Access is getting her in. Retention is keeping her there through the years she is most likely to quit. Leverage is making sure what she learned becomes something she leads with.
Said plainly: play, stay, lead. That is the version on our homepage and the one most people repeat back to us. It means the same three things.
The stages tell you who. The phases tell you what. Every program we run sits at the intersection of the two — which is what the next section shows.
The coverage map
Which program is there when she is.
A pipeline is only a pipeline if something is running at every stage of it. Here is what we actually operate, plotted against the stage of life it reaches. Where a bar is short, that is not an oversight — it is a program with a specific job.
Stages are a person’s point in life, not a strict age band, and several programs deliberately straddle a boundary rather than stopping at one. One distinction worth naming: the iWIN Sports programs serve girls and women, while the LEAD Scholarship and LEAD Fellows recognize scholar-athletes of any gender — the scholarship honors both Alice and Charles Taylor and has named male and female recipients since it began. The two platforms overlap on this map without being identical.
What the map shows that a list would not
You can trace a single person straight across it. A girl funded by an IX Grant at seven, at camp at nine, a Coach in Training at fourteen, a LEAD Scholar at eighteen, a paid coach at nineteen, a LEAD Fellow at twenty-two, mentoring in the Collective at thirty. Not one girl has done all of that yet — the earliest stages only began funding recently — but there is now no stage at which the path simply stops.
The thinnest column is Stage 01. Reaching the youngest girls depends almost entirely on grants and camps, and expanding that is a matter of money and locations rather than new program design.
The four stages
Who is here, and what we owe them.
Awareness & Early Engagement
Young girls starting out in sport — and young boys, who become the peers, teammates and allies those girls will spend the next decade alongside.
- Access to sports environments that are built to include rather than to select
- Early exposure to teamwork, movement and self-belief
- First experiences positive enough to shape a lifelong attitude to both leadership and fairness
Identity & Growth
Junior high and high school scholar-athletes, holding academics, self-esteem and sport at the same time — through the exact years when girls quit at twice the rate boys do.
- Leadership developed through sport rather than talked about separately from it
- Confidence built during the years identity actually forms
- Skills that work on the field and in the classroom
- The Alice & Charles Taylor Scholar-Athlete LEAD Scholarship for graduating seniors
Transition to Purpose
Women who used to compete, now moving into higher education, first careers and early leadership roles — and often losing the identity that carried them there without anything replacing it.
- Reconnection to a leadership identity that no longer depends on being an athlete
- Career readiness, mentorship and purpose-driven programming
- Paid coaching work and paid internships inside girls’ sport itself
- LEAD Fellows — established Fall 2026, drawn from more than a decade of scholarship recipients
- Support through the transitions where people quietly drop out of their own ambitions
Legacy & Leadership
Women leading across sectors, parents of scholar-athletes, and the advocates and allies who decide whether the next generation finds a door open or closed.
- Leadership pipelines that feed back into the earlier stages instead of terminating
- Community impact and advocacy
- Generational change through mentorship and influence — the only mechanism that compounds
Stage 02 into Stage 03
The same camp that took her money starts paying her.
The clearest thing we run is also the least discussed: a structured route from being a camper to being employed in girls’ sport. It is not a mentoring metaphor. It is a job ladder with an application process and an hourly rate, and it is where Stage 02 becomes Stage 03 in practice.
Every internship is paid
Coaching, photography, videography, marketing, and customized placements for university credit — all of them paid. An unpaid internship is a filter that selects for families who can afford one, which is the exact filter this Foundation exists to remove. Keeping them paid is an access decision, not a perk.
Why this is the strongest thing on the page
Every other program here helps a girl participate. This one hands her authority over younger girls, pays her for it, and gives her something to put on a resume. She stops being the person the pipeline serves and becomes part of how it runs — at fourteen.
Why it is not a line
The last stage is supposed to feed the first one.
Described as four steps, this looks like a conveyor belt. It is not one, and the difference matters: the model only works if people who reach the end come back to the beginning. That is not a hope. It is the design.
Every arrow in that chain is a program on this page, and the last one returns to the first. A woman in Stage 04 is not a graduate of this work — she is the reason Stage 01 keeps running. Which is also why we track our alumni rather than simply congratulating them, and why LEAD Fellows, established in Fall 2026, is drawn from more than a decade of scholarship recipients rather than recruited from outside.
A deliberate choice
Boys are in stage one on purpose.
Most organizations working on girls in sport speak only to girls. We think that is a design flaw. The culture a fourteen-year-old girl plays inside is made largely by people who are not her — teammates, brothers, coaches, fathers, athletic directors — and a program that never addresses them is asking girls to be resilient inside conditions nobody is changing.
Boys, early
The eight-year-old boy on the next field becomes a teammate, a coach, or an athletic director. Whether he treats girls’ sport as real is substantially decided before he is fifteen.
Parents, throughout
After money, the most common barrier women name is that the adults around them were not engaged. Our mother–daughter and father–daughter clinics exist because of that finding, not in spite of it.
Coaches and communities
The Changemakers Circuit goes to whole rooms rather than to girls alone — schools, clubs, boards, companies. Culture is not changed by the person with the least power in it.
Why we believe the pipeline is real
Eight years, versus six.
Women who went on to hold formal leadership roles had played sport for an average of eight years. Women who did not averaged six. That single comparison is the argument for this entire model: the intervention is not one great season, it is not quitting — and every stage on this page exists to buy a girl two more years.
Keep it open
A pipeline closes quietly, one stage at a time.
It does not fail with an announcement. It fails when a registration fee goes unpaid in March, when a camp has no scholarship left, when a twenty-two-year-old has nobody to call. Those are all small, fundable moments.