“They were so full of energy, life, promise, potential, but then somewhere along the way, they lost that spark,” says Kiely, a half-Navajo, half-White MBA graduate who serves as the interim executive director of the National Association of Women MBAs. Alcoholism, violence and poverty took a toll on the young girls’ drive and optimism by the time they had reached their teens. “I wouldn’t hear about anyone going to school.”
Though Kiely had earned a master’s from the University of Houston’s C.T. Bauer College of Business and started a job in energy consulting, she was not satisfied. She felt she could do more. Seeing her extended family struggle to further their education inspired her to provide a support network for young American Indian girls, so Kiely reached out to the National Association of Women MBAs to pitch a mentoring idea.
“Even though my parents had gone to college, I didn’t really have anyone I could rely on to get there,” says Kiely, noting she needed more guidance to navigate the SATs, college applications and scholarship forms. “I thought, ‘If my relatives need it, then there [are] probably a lot of people out there that need it.’ I wanted to go back to talk to some of the girls to get them excited about their futures.”
In 2009, under the umbrella of the National Association of Women MBAs, the Shideezhi mentoring program was born with five mentees. By February 2010, Kiely’s role expanded from a volunteer spearheading the program to an employee as the membership liaison charged with taking the new mentoring program to a more professional level.
“They [NAWMBA] asked me to turn it into a national program,” Kiely says of the mostly virtual-based program that runs all four academic years of high school.
This year, the Shideezhi Project, which means “my little sister” in Navajo, celebrated its first graduating high school class. To date, the initiative has taken 60 girls under its wings to provide guidance, college counseling and inspiration for success. Every mentee has gone on to at least a two-year college. Kiely says propelling the young women to get a higher education is key to the Shideezhi’s mission.
