A year after launching its Embrace Ambition Summit, Tory Burch’s foundation is disrupting its own business model.
Instead of hosting a daylong conference in New York, as it did in April 2017, the foundation is rolling out a speaker series in five cities in an effort to reach more women. “Our goal is not just to be inspirational, but also to be action-oriented,” says Gabrielle Raymond McGee, chief operating officer of the Tory Burch Foundation, which was founded by luxury and lifestyle entrepreneur Tory Burch. “Our goal [is] to really make sure that women and girls [are] owning their ambition, and that we’re creating safe environments for all people to embrace their ambitions, whatever that means–being a stay-at-home mom or a corporate executive or a board member or an entrepreneur.”
The series starts tonight in Burch’s hometown of Philadelphia, and will travel to Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco. The series concludes in New York City on Friday, which is International Women’s Day. Content from the sessions will be streamed via the foundation’s website.
The series is an extension of Burch’s “Embrace Ambition” initiative, which she launched in 2017 to encourage women in particular to not shy away from their desire to succeed.
Speakers range from Tina Tchen, the lawyer heading up the Time’s Up legal defense fund, to Gitanjali Rao, a 13-year-old inventor.
Additionally, each city will feature five different women talking about what ambition means to them. The foundation put out an online call for applications in which women explained how they are shattering stereotypes.
“We had no idea what the response would be, but within the first 24 hours, we received 1,200 submissions,” McGee says. “Our team looked at each other and we said, ‘We can’t just receive these stories. We have to tell these stories.'”
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