Founder of Dare to Dream

Grace Shafir is a happily married mother of four daughters. She has devoted both her personal and professional life to motivating others to excel.

Earlier in her career, she created and marketed products designed to help ease children into learning: safety scissors to protect their fingers, notched, easy to read rulers to help them measure, recycling crayon molds, environmentally friendly art projects, two health and fitness books, and a series of 36 early learning activity books.

After more than a decade in business, she sold her company to dedicate her energies to Dare to Dream. Dare to Dream originally was to consist of a single middle school assembly which would be turned into a single video offering girls positive, real world role models. It has since become a far more expansive program featuring prominent American women from every field.

Grace is also involved with civic boards. She spearheaded a SFEE SHOPA Foundation for Education Excellence committee that raised more than $1,000,000 in 1996 for needy schools. She has also been a member of the board of Kids For A Clean Environment since 1989 (its founding year), and has watched its membership grow from 6 to more than 300,000 children. She has been a Coordinator for the United Nations Environment Programme's Global Youth Forum, and a Judge for the national finals of Students In Free Enterprise. Grace is an active member of the Committee of 200, the American Association of University Women, International Women's Forum, International Women in Media, the NY Women's Agenda, the National Press Club, and National Association of Television Programming Executives.

Grace has been a featured speaker at Harvard and Columbia Business Schools, Carlow College and the National Middle School Association. She has been interviewed on CNN, Fox, the Today Show, the Home Show, Good Day, New York, the USA Network (radio), the UPI Network (radio), and was the subject of a feature in Family Circle magazine.

Grace attributes her success to her refusal to believe that there is anything she can't do and to a sense of fairness toward our daughters. She has interviewed over 200 incredible women on camera and is beginning to digitize their interivews for the web. It will be the largest video archive of women leaders.