2005 — 2025
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Education changes what we believe is possible.
Education has been the quiet thread running through twenty years of my life, a constant reminder that systemic change begins with the power of learning and the resilience of human potential.
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2025 — Seeing the Whole
Lasting impact is not created by individual heroes. It emerges from ecosystems where people can connect, contribute, and belong.
After years of measuring how many people we reached, we began asking an equally important question: how healthy is the organization making that impact possible? Through McKinsey.org’s Organizational Health Index for Nonprofits, Mexoxo examined the systems, culture, leadership, and relationships beneath the numbers. It reinforced something twenty years of work had slowly taught me.
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150,000
women across 160 countries
Mexoxo had reached more than 150,000 women across 160 countries. But scale also created a new responsibility: to understand why our work was working. Our first randomized controlled trial began turning years of practice into research and evidence. That year, Mexoxo was also named a finalist for the P3 Impact Award, and Hillary Rodham Clinton marked our work in a special message. The ecosystem had become larger than anything I had imagined when I met those first two women in Mexico.
2023 — Connection
Every ecosystem ultimately begins with human connection.
2022 — 20,000
Within a year, our reach grew to 20,000 women. Technology allowed education to travel farther. Partnerships allowed trust to travel with it. I was beginning to understand that scale does not come from doing more yourself—it comes from designing systems that allow others to belong and contribute.
2021 — From growth to an ecosystem. A new question emerged: what if we could take everything we had learned and make world-class education accessible at an entirely different scale? The L’Oréal Fund for Women believed in that ambition and committed to supporting our work. A partnership with Cornell University opened another door. The next ecosystem began to take shape.
2020
5,000
Seven years after beginning with two women in Mexico, we reached 5,000. That same year, Greece nominated Mexoxo for UNESCO’s Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education. A promise made publicly in 2015 had become a collective achievement.
2017
2015
Together with The Coca-Cola Foundation, we set ourselves a seemingly audacious goal: reach 5,000 women by 2020. Scale began to mean something different to me. Not simply reaching more people, but creating structures through which more people could participate.
I returned to Greece and established Mexoxo’s Greek entity. By then, our work had reached 1,000 women across Mexico, the United States, and Nepal, and we received our first major foundation grant from The Coca-Cola Foundation. Coming home did not make the ecosystem smaller. It gave it another root.
2018
I joined the Clinton Global Initiative and made a public commitment to reach 5,000 women by 2020. I mentored university students through a special delegation chaired by Chelsea Clinton and spoke at the United Nations’ 70th anniversary celebrations. I was given three minutes on stage. I used two of them to let one of the women we served tell her own story. Some voices are more important than our own.
2014 — Mexoxo
Mexoxo officially became a nonprofit organization. What had begun as an experiment was becoming an ecosystem: women, educators, mentors, communities, and partners connected by the belief that opportunity should not depend on where you are born.
2013 — Finding Purpose in Tijuana
Professor Muhammad Yunus challenged me to follow a dream I could not yet name. Professor Joanne Lawrence helped me give it shape. I left the life I knew and went to Mexico. What followed began with two women—and a belief that access to knowledge could change the trajectory of a life.
2012 — 2005
2012 — Proximity changes possibility. I became the Hult Prize’s first employee and found myself working alongside an extraordinary global community, including President Bill Clinton and Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus. I learned that transformative ideas rarely grow alone. They grow through people who see possibility in one another.
2011 — Discovering social impact. Alongside my MBA, I volunteered for the Hult Prize and experienced the Clinton Global Initiative. I began to see what becomes possible when entrepreneurship, philanthropy, education, and people from radically different worlds gather around a shared challenge.
2010 — A wider world. I was accepted to Hult International Business School and moved to Boston for my MBA. Leaving Greece expanded more than my geography. It changed the scale at which I imagined my life and work.
2009 — Learning without borders. I immersed myself in English and discovered distance learning, taking online courses in emotional intelligence and business strategy. Education suddenly felt borderless—and so did possibility.
2005 — The beginning. I graduated from the University of the Aegean and began my career in events. I didn’t know it then, but I was learning my first lesson in ecosystems: meaningful experiences happen when the right people, ideas, and conditions come together.
TO THE PEOPLE ALONG THE WAY
Did I make mistakes? More than I can count.
Did I miss opportunities? More than I can count.
Did I choose the wrong priorities sometimes? More than I can count.
But there is one thing I know I did right.
I met thousands of incredible people along the way.
I listened to them. I followed them. I trusted them. Sometimes I hurt them, and sometimes they hurt me. I failed people, and at times I felt failed by them. We inspired one another, disappointed one another, challenged one another, and changed one another.
Through all of it, I chose to embrace the beautiful imperfection of being human.
I chose to believe in the good that exists within people—and within myself. And I had the extraordinary privilege of learning from thousands of human beings whose ideas, courage, generosity, contradictions, and stories became part of my own.
Perhaps that has been the greatest education of all.
So, to every person who has been part of these twenty years.
Thank you for the road we have already walked, for the one we are walking now, and for whatever road comes next.
Thank you.
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