Sixteen girls arrived nervous.
They left more certain.
Every scholar in our inaugural Summer Intensive completed an end-of-summer reflection. In their own words, the change was not primarily academic — it was the moment each girl decided she was allowed to take up space.
In March 2020, schools across New York City closed. The girls in this inaugural cohort were eight, nine, and ten years old.
They spent third, fourth, and fifth grade — the years children learn to raise a hand, present to a room, take a risk in front of peers, and make a friend across a lunch table — behind screens and inside masks. COVID-19 didn’t just interrupt their education; it interrupted the specific developmental window children learn how to be in a room with other people.
It shows in what they told us. Nearly every gain our scholars named this summer was a social one: public speaking, speaking up, reaching out first, feeling comfortable being seen. The most-cited challenge across the cohort was connecting with new people. What can read as a soft outcome is, for these girls, the recovery of something concrete and specific that was taken from them at a formative age.
Every scholar Her Climb will ever serve will have lived through this. The youngest members of future cohorts were even younger when the pandemic began. The developmental gap does not close on its own — it closes through exactly what Her Climb provides: consistent, structured, relationship-centered time in a safe space, with high expectations and real stakes.
This report is certainly rooted in Her Climb’s four pillars and four tracks. But underneath all of it, it’s about what happens when you give girls who lost two years of social development a room where showing up matters, where their voice is expected, and where the person next to them is counting on them to be there.
The numbers are bigger than they look because the context is bigger than most people remember.
We asked each scholar for one word describing her first day, then one word describing how she feels now. Nothing captures the program’s effect more plainly.
Asked to name three strengths they discovered or deepened, scholars converged on a single cluster: the courage to be seen and heard.
Asked to describe a moment they saw themselves differently, scholars pointed overwhelmingly at presenting their work aloud — brand boards, future-self boards, teleprompter reads — and at site visits to CNN and Accenture, where a dream job stopped being abstract. Almost none named a specific lesson or worksheet — though tennis was a resounding favorite. The turning point was consistently the moment a girl was asked to stand up, be looked at, and speak, and discovered the room was on her side.
We told our scholars to keep it real.
Four requests came up repeatedly when scholars were asked what they wished we had done differently.
“This program belongs to the girls in it. So we keep asking, researching, and listening — and we build what comes next around what we hear.” — Rita Omokha
Based on end-of-summer reflections collected July 2026 from all 16 Summer Intensive scholars. Quotations are scholars’ own words, attributed by first name only.