An Advocate for Moms with an Eye for ROI

Meredith Lipnick F23 cares about both the bottom line and the story behind it. An early career experience in New York’s fashion industry led her to deeply reflect on community impact. 

At Tommy Hilfiger, Lipnick worked in buying, product development and merchandising. In service of the Millennium Development Goals, a predecessor to today’s United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the Tommy Hilfiger Foundation had partnered with a village in sub-Saharan Africa to support community-led changes to promote clean water, gender equity and business empowerment. Lipnick was selected as an ambassador and traveled to Ruhiira, Uganda to meet with local partners.  

“They explained it as softening the soil,” she said, “providing support and mentorship to show the community that people genuinely cared about their progress and valued their leadership in driving positive change. 

“It was an amazing experience – one that ultimately led me to pivot,” she added. 

A Flexible Business Degree to Supercharge Your Career

Following her work with the foundation, Lipnick dove into work in corporate responsibility and sustainability. 

“The fashion industry has always been super interesting to me,” said Lipnick. “There is global influence in terms of the supply chain, in terms of trends and what drives fashion and concept, and in terms of the consumer. Little changes in various parts of the world can have these massive impacts globally.”

Lipnick began exploring this line of work while experiencing major life changes: she gave birth to her first child, moved from New York to Boston and then the pandemic arrived. She knew what she wanted from her work and was looking for a change to supercharge her career.

“I found the Master of Global Business Administration (GBA) program at Fletcher, and it had everything that I was looking for,” said Lipnick. “This global viewpoint to business, this really strong foundation of impact, pulling together policy and business and knowing that you can't do any of that effectively in a silo – that really attracted me to the program.”

“Even though I was local, having it remote was key,” she added. “I had one baby, and I actually was pregnant and delivered my second baby while I was in the program.” 

The Business Case for Child Care

When Lipnick returned to work, she found her studies in the GBA empowered her to confront the issues she cares about. 

“I started doing a lot more policy work as environmental policy heated up in the E.U. and was getting some heat in the United States,” she said. “I felt like I could apply case studies to business, and law and diplomacy to contracts. It all fit into the work that I was doing and gave me more confidence to thrive in that space.”

Today, Lipnick is director of private sector strategy at Moms First, a nonprofit founded by Reshma Saujani, the mind behind Girls Who Code. The organization recognizes that the structural needs of working families disproportionately affect women and moms, creating obstacles for mothers to return to work. 

This is a challenge Lipnick had felt firsthand. Now at Moms First, she leverages her business insight to help others address the problem. 

“Today, child care is neither affordable nor accessible, and it's pulling women out of the workforce in a way that has huge economic impacts,” said Lipnick. “We work with Fortune 500 companies, small businesses and restaurants to implement care policies in their portfolio and create opportunities for companies to become advocates for public-private partnership in advancing child care policy.”

“This is an economic imperative that affects our national, state and local economies,” she added. “If you don't have a robust workforce, then you're leaving millions of dollars on the table. We're going to policy makers and business leaders and saying, ‘We're not just here to talk about women and moms. We're here to talk about an economic disadvantage that our country is currently undergoing.’”

Skills Development for Mid-Career Professionals

From her experience in house in social impact roles, Lipnick understood that companies invest when there is a powerful business case. The team developed tools to help businesses assess this financial impact, including an ROI calculator so employers could look at some of the underlying symptoms of absenteeism, retention and worker productivity – and how gaps in child care are costing them money. 

“I don't think I would be able to articulate this as clearly if I didn't have support from Fletcher,” said Lipnick. “The GBA allowed me to dive into those skills mid-career – it all gelled and made a lot more sense with where I was in my career.”

“Developing these skills that are relevant across business functions – whether that be legal or sourcing or marketing – helped me feel I’m bringing my best self to the table,” she added. “The GBA program has made me so much more confident in approaching conversations in these cross-functional relationships, which has been a huge strength.”

Read more about Fletcher’s Master of Global Business Administration degree program.