Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Vollman.
Hi Sarah, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
After my sister Jess passed away in 2020, it took about one day for my family and me to decide to create the Jessica Vollman Foundation in her honor. She was so steadfast and dedicated to her life mission of empowering women in entrepreneurship, it seemed only natural for us to continue her legacy with a charitable organization. This was a woman who started her own business in her twenties, was a CEO at 32, and still made time to serve as mentor for various organizations and fly home for every niece and nephew’s birthday party.
When we sat down to create the mission, I poured over her published writing in Forbes, sorted through our email chains and articles shared, and returned back to some groups she was a part of: Cherie Blair Foundation, the LSE Generate Accelerator. The common theme was this: how do you remove barriers for women throughout their business journeys tangibly and tactfully? The Jessica Vollman Foundation’s mission is to promote career advancement for women globally through access to education, closing the skills gap and job flexibility. As the youngest of four girls and the appointed Primary Advisor for JVF, I felt this best exemplified my sister and her work.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
There will always be challenges when building something out of grief and loss. Jessica Vollman Foundation will never replace my sister or the things she would’ve continued to achieve if allowed a longer time here. However, now her life exists in a new form – through the women in our community we’ve supported thus far, those they’ll champion as their own businesses succeed, and the women we’ve yet to meet.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Running Jessica Vollman Foundation is not my full-time job. I work in TV/film and jumped headfirst into this after my sister’s passing. However, the further I dove into the female founder ecosystem – by speaking to women founders and C-suite executives, reading books/articles, signing up for every newsletter – I realized the barriers to entry for women to ascend to the top of any field are always fairly similar. There are unconscious biases that inform decisions outside of our control, which is why finding community is so important. If you are a woman founder, maybe outside a traditional pathway, you need bespoke resources to keep going. You need peers to lean on, and to share information with. That’s what I hope to offer with JVF: barriers to entry outside of your talent, ability and work ethic shouldn’t prevent you from taking your business to the next level. We are a family-run non-profit, and we want the foundation to feel like a family that’s there to support you during any stage of your entrepreneurial journey.
How do you define success?
If we have made a positive impact on our JVF grantees in any tangible way, that to me is success. I am extremely proud and inspired by our grantees thus far and the businesses they founded. They all have bootstrapped and managed to build something all while working full-time jobs or full-time fields of study, and each of them have a community-minded or philanthropic mission. I continue to learn from them and hope they can be proud to be a part of our organization.
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