There are ceremonies that celebrate. There are others that transfigure.
Inside the storied Harvard Club of New York, beneath chandeliers that have long illuminated legacy born of exclusion, the 2025 One Girl Icon Awards Luncheon opened a new page in the architecture of power. This was not a luncheon. It was a ritual, wrapped in elegance, story, and embodied fire. It was a summoning.
Before a single name was called, the room softened into breath and stillness, guided by the grounding presence of Leslie Booker, whose invocation moved through the space like ancestral memory. With grace and clarity, she invited each person to arrive in fullness—not as title, not as performance, but as truth. In that silence, hearts widened. And from that stillness, the afternoon began.
At the center of it all stood Meaghan Barakett, Founder of One Girl Inc., a woman who does not speak in slogans, but in frameworks. She has not built a brand. She has built infrastructure—for women to rise without apology, to lead without waiting, to reimagine what it means to be powerful and whole. One Girl Inc. is not a project. It is a blueprint for the next era of feminine leadership: nuanced, intergenerational, and wildly alive.
One Girl is a powerful collective of women committed to igniting personal growth and community transformation. Through connection, support, and shared purpose, our members are inspired to go inward, rise up, and lead meaningful change—in their own lives and in the world around them.
What unfolded in that room was not only the reflection of that mission—it was its full, radiant embodiment. These women did not gather to be seen. They gathered to be heard, to remember, and to reclaim.
The awards were not ornamental. They were declarations. Honoring women who do not just occupy space—they alter it.
Jennifer Jones Austin, receiving the Jane Goodall Award, spoke with a grace forged in policy and prayer. As CEO of FPWA, she has shaped the social and legislative landscape with a compassion that is not sentimental but structural. Her words landed as both balm and blueprint, a reminder that leadership grounded in empathy is not weakness—it is legacy in motion.
Sophia Li, honored for her conscious leadership, radiated with the kind of clarity that silences a room. As the founder of STEWARDSHIP Media, she speaks the language of the earth and the internet with equal fluency, reminding us that consciousness is not a luxury—it is a responsibility. Her presence was quiet, luminous, and unmistakably powerful, the embodiment of alignment as activism.
Pranoo Kumar, awarded for her intersectional work in education, brought the kind of resonance that moves through the body. Founder of Rohi’s Readery and a TEDx speaker, she is dismantling outdated narratives and building spaces where children see themselves not as exceptions, but as center. Her voice cracked something open—a reminder that truth in the hands of the feminine is not only pedagogical, it is prophetic.
The room then gave way to voice in its most transcendent form. Natascha Bessez rose like invocation and sang not to entertain, but to liberate. Her voice carried the weight of joy hard-earned and sorrow metabolized. It moved like smoke through cathedral light, folding into the architecture of the moment, baptizing it in sound. Her performance did not follow the ceremony—it was the ceremony.
Threaded throughout the space were visual testaments by Shanequa Benitez, Claudia Echeverria, and Shenna Vaughn, curated by Art on the Ave NYC. Their work did not serve as backdrop—it was a form of dialogue, an unspoken record of what women endure, survive, and create. Their canvases held lineages of pain and possibility, woven into color and presence. What they offered was not decoration—it was declaration.
By the end, the air was different. Not quieter—deeper. What unfolded that day was more than a celebration. It was a living elegy to the sorrow we carry and a hymn to the strength we become. From loss to triumph, from silence to thunder, this room held it all.
The feminine essence of storytelling—raw, intimate, unfiltered—proved itself again as not just art, but medicine. It reminded us that our stories save lives. They uplift, they bind, they build.
None of this would have unfolded with such clarity and grace without the women who shaped the day from the inside out. Behind the seamless beauty and orchestration of this event was a leadership team whose brilliance was embedded in every detail. Kara Byron, Julia Kang, Jenny Lau, Manda Magyar, and Vanessa Molina held the vision like a flame, guiding it to life with elegance, strength, and sacred precision. Their work was invisible in the way all great architecture is: it held everything.
This was not about inspiration. It was about remembrance. A collective return to the knowing that we are already enough. Already powerful. Already free.
Join us. Step into the circle. There is no permission required. Only presence.
@onegirlinc | onegirlny.org | hello@onegirlny.org
We are not the future. We are the architects of now.
