259: 28% Is Not Enough: Sarah Jakle on DemocraShe, Civic Engagement, and Why High School Girls Are the Future of Government

I get pitches in my inbox every day. Most of them I can't fit into the schedule, no matter how great they are.

This one stopped me cold.

Sarah Jakle is the founder and executive director of DemocraShe, a nonpartisan nonprofit offering free online training to high school girls in evidence-based resiliency skills, leadership, and civic engagement. They pay their participants $15 an hour. They recruit specifically from historically underrepresented communities. They are 90% girls of color and 70% first-generation Americans. And they have a wait list seven times longer than their current capacity.

Only 28% of Congress is women. Only 11% is women of color. Sarah and her organization are doing something about that, and they're starting in high school, because that's the last time boys and girls believe equally that they can run for office.

This conversation genuinely moved me. Have a notebook ready.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

• Why Sarah started DemocraShe after watching the 2020 election, and what she saw that nobody was addressing

• The two specific barriers she identified: women not seeing themselves as candidates and the outsized harassment women face when they do run

• Why DemocraShe pays its participants $15 an hour, and what that teaches young women beyond the paycheck

• The peer-led model: why the program is built by the girls, for the girls, from the name to the curriculum to the workshops

• The nervous system tools built into every session: grounding, the inner best friend, savoring, and the Viktor Frankl quote you will want on your vision board

• Why community over competition has to be taught early, while young women's brains are still neuroplastic

• Sarah's own story: being told in 2014 she would never work again, and how the same skills she now teaches girls are what got her back up

How to Get Involved:

• Apply to the program: democrashe.org

• Donate to support paid participation and program access: democrashe.org

• Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn

Listen and Subscribe:

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

If this episode fired something up in you, share it with a high school girl in your life. Or a parent. Or a teacher. Or anyone who needs to hear that running for office is a birthright, not a privilege reserved for a certain kind of person.