Melinda Gates

"If you can empower them with the right things, the right tools, they can lift up their family. And that ultimately lifts up their community, lifts up their society."

~Melinda Gates 

Melinda Gates is part of the organization Women in the World, and as such she travels all over to developing countries conversing and building relationships with underprivileged women. In an interview with Yahoo! she talks about how giving women even the smallest tool such as access to a vaccine for her children or a contraceptive and it could cause huge change with the other people in her community.

In class we learned that empowerment is a crucial part of leadership and that is exactly what Gates is doing for these women. By providing access to the materials I mentioned above, it gives the women more of a choice in what goes on in their lives which empowers them to take a bigger part in their community. Gates mentions that the women are the biggest influence on their families lives and if they feel more empowered they might use that influence to have a bigger part in what happens in their society. So in a way, it's building leaders. 

Melinda Gates is an excellent example of leadership in the way she works so hard to empower women all over the world and works so hard in the US to make it simple and worthwhile for women to donate to her cause. In the future I want to make a difference and learning from her example it seems like the right way to go would be to focus mostly on empowering the people around me to see what they have to share and then combining our talents to make a difference in the world around us.

Photo by Suzanne Lee