By Patricia Sellers
The Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit began with a bang last evening. Writer/director Nora Ephron interviewed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi before an audience of more than 400 women leaders and a few good men.
Warren Buffett (BRKA) and Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein were at my dinner table. Before dinner I chatted on stage with the two winners of this year’s Golman Sachs-Fortune Global Women Leaders Award: Andeisha Farid of Afghanistan and Susan Rammekwa of South Africa. These two amazing women run orphanages and, after completing their U.S.-sponsored programs — Goldman’s 10,000 Women and the Fortune-U.S. State Department Mentoring program — they’re paying it forward in very big ways in their home countries.
One woman who had to bow out of this year’s MPWomen Summit last minute is Gerry Laybourne, the former CEO of Oxygen Media who sold her company to NBC Universal
(GE). Every spring, when the Fortune-U.S. State Department mentees are in the U.S. shadowing Summit participants, Laybourne spends time with these international rising stars. She has so inspired our mentoring program alums that many of them have returned home and staged Mentor’s Walks all around the developing world. Here’s Laybourne’s story of how one woman from a Mentor’s Walk in Uganda inspired her.
Last year I went to Uganda on a Mentor’s Walk, which began as an event at Oxygen, where I was the co-founder and CEO. Accomplished women walk with young women and share advice and inspiration in Uganda, I was thrilled to see hundreds of women walking together and telling their stories.
On the walk, one of my mentees, Ninah Talyowe, told me she wanted to be a surgeon and go to Johns Hopkins. A few months later Ninah got in touch with me via email to ask for my help. I suggested a stepping stone: Go to a boarding school to help her get into an American college. She thought that sounded great. “How would I go about that?” she asked.
No problem. Via email, I contacted our kids’ and my husband’s boarding schools. One said yes and one said no to accepting her application. She got the application, filled it out, and got the recommendations. Easy.
Ninah got accepted to boarding school. I had our family foundation set up an African scholarship at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario. That’s my husband’s school.
I was intoxicated by how easy it was to help someone get connected to their dream. But you know the story does not here.
Turns out that getting a Canadian student a U.S. visa is not at all easy. My assistant and I have spent hundred of hours in the last two months talking to Canadian high officials, FedEx clerks, medical examiners, accountants, American ambassadors, and others in the U.S. State Department to free Ninah from the bureaucratic system.
At first they did not think I was “sincere” about my support. But then, last week, we were told that the visa was waiting for Ninah. Today she is flying to Toronto, and I will be there to meet her — a month late for school but filled with hope.
I just went to JC Penney’s to buy her boots and coats. I’m on the board of directors there. Easy… and the rest, hard and all worth doing.