Giving Compass' Take:

• Lynn Johnson and Allison Kenny are running a B Corporation that promotes young girls empowerment through theatre and the arts. 

• How can arts translate to female empowerment? Why is women empowerment work so crucial for the future? 

• Lately, the term 'empowerment' has become very ambiguous. Read about how different female global leaders are defining the term as it relates to gender equality. 

Lynn Johnson started her professional career as theater teacher and artist. For years, she used the theater as a tool for community-building, social and emotional learning, and personal transformation. She met her wife, Allison Kenny, while they were both teaching theater at a summer camp in 2002. “Almost as soon as we met, we decided that we wanted to create our own programming,” Johnson recalls.

The pair ran children’s summer camps in the San Francisco Bay area for the next six years. Then, out of pure coincidence, all the enrollees at one of their 2008 camp sessions were girls. Both Johnson and Kenny had backgrounds in girls’ educational programming and thought, “Wow, this is cool,” Johnson says. “We decided to make the theme that summer all about the magic and power of being a girl.”

“From a social-business standpoint, it hit all the buttons,” Johnson says. “We thought, ‘This is what we’re supposed to be doing.’ We rebranded our business and changed our mission to working with girls exclusively.”

The couple’s social enterprise, Spotlight: Girls, is now a certified B Corp with a mission “to educate, inspire, and activate girls and women to take center stage.” Through enrichment programs and a multimedia platform, the Spotlight: Girls team teaches participants “to love ourselves and each other, and to become the leaders the world needs us to be,” Johnson says. Some of the girls who attended the fateful 2008 camp session where it all began even work for the company now.

Read the full article about entrepreneurship in women empowerment by Conscious Company at Medium.