One Year After Deciding to Merge, We're Here to Share Everything We Learned

By Christina Lowery, Co-CEO/Co-Founder of Girl Rising and Tammy Tibbetts, Co-Founder of She's the First and Chief Advisor of Girl Rising

Here’s one thing we bet we have in common with you: You’re navigating more change than ever before in your career. Whether you’re leading an organisation through financial instability, geopolitical upheaval, the explosion of AI, or shifting workplace dynamics, we feel you. When it’s your job to create stability for your team, these daunting circumstances become a crash course in change management. And in this crazy course, it’s hard to tell who your teacher and classmates are; it’s easy to feel alone, stuck in the darkness.

We’re here to turn on a light and, along with our team, share what we’ve learned — and continue to learn, in real time — about rising above the threats through strategic collaboration. Even if you're not merging, we think what we learned applies to anyone being asked to do more with less, who needs to lead people through uncertainty.

If someone had published their “Merger Diaries” last year, we would have been voracious readers. In 2025, we led our organisations through a strategic merger. Our goal: create the deepest impact we could, with and for girls, to improve their communities and futures. In the process, we hoped to become the example we wished we had in the nonprofit sector.

We’re each the co-founder of a global nonprofit organisation dedicated to building a world where girls are educated, respected, and heard — Girl Rising (Christina) and She's the First (Tammy). Our organisations grew up side by side over the past 16 years. We’ve been fans of each other’s work, periodically crossing paths and popping in each other’s inboxes for a friendly chat.

At the start of January 2025, a peer CEO invited us to a call, with a very open-ended agenda: to explore “what our work could look like combined in a more official way in the future.” What ensued would change the future of our work for the better — at a time when it felt like everything was getting apocalyptically worse.

This year, we’re going to walk back in time and tell you how we got from there to here: in the first week of being legally unified as Girl Rising, following a successful merger.

part of the She's the First x Girl Rising team at our first-ever staff retreat, held in Kenya, November 2025

You already know we believe in mergers as a strategic first choice, not a last resort (read our op-ed in Candid here). But you may not yet know how we decided to merge, how we engaged our stakeholders, how we built a budget that cut expenses and expanded revenue, how we inspired funders to support us.

You probably want to know where we messed up so you don’t repeat our mistakes. And you definitely want to know how you navigate the beautiful journey of leading a diverse, global team that puts their trust in you, shaping a new workplace culture that brings out the best in everyone. Because our people are the power behind our programs.

We want our Merger Diaries to meet your needs. You’ll hear from us as well as other members of the Girl Rising team (starting with our co-leaders, Catherine Kiama and Girl Rising co-CEO Nidhi Shukla, who hold the keys to the most important piece: our programs). We promise to be honest and straightforward in supporting all of you who are writing a new chapter, despite impossible constraints and relentless uncertainty.

What burning questions do you want us to answer first? Please comment, subscribe to get updated on our posts, and forward this to someone you think we could help.

#StrongerTogether — always!