EXCLUSIVE TO GIVING CLUB MEMBERS
Stories Rooted in Impact
The Frank & Eileen Foundation exists to create more women entrepreneurs by unlocking access to exceptional entrepreneurship education for young people everywhere at no cost.
Our First Impact Story
We’re delighted to share our inaugural Impact Story, the first in a series exclusive to Giving Club members, taking a deeper look behind the scenes of the Foundation and spotlighting the positive impact we are building as a donor-powered community committed to women’s entrepreneurship. Today, we want to introduce you to the two visionary women building that access from the ground up.
Two Engineers, One Mission
Founder and President of the Frank & Eileen Foundation, Audrey McLoghlin, grew up being told she could be anything she wanted—as long as it was a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. She chose to be an engineer. After college, she took a job at an MIT tech startup, and then did something no one in her orbit had quite mapped out for her: she leaned into what she really loved, which was building things, and started a company.
What followed was nearly two decades of turning a single obsession—the finest Italian fabrics in the world—into the 100% woman-owned, woman-led brand Frank & Eileen is today. Audrey built F&E on gut instinct honed through her experiences as a serial entrepreneur, navigating messy moments and finding silver linings along the way. Entrepreneurship changed her for the better. Now, Audrey wants to pay the benefits of entrepreneurship forward at scale, for as many women as possible.
Executive Director of the Foundation, Lee Mirsky, grew up with a love of breaking down complex problems and finding simple solutions. It’s no surprise that she became enamored with Physics—a subject built on the idea that even the universe’s biggest mysteries can be broken down into a small set of simple rules. Lee decided to pursue a career in engineering and earned a PhD in Materials Science from the University of Southern California. Somewhere in the middle of that doctorate, though, a different calling became impossible to ignore: she wanted to teach. Specifically, she wanted to help young people see that they are capable of solving complex problems and be part of their journey to build the confidence to take on any challenge.
After completing her PhD, Lee became a physics teacher at Marlborough School, a 7th-12th grade girls’ school in Los Angeles. Her teaching subjects expanded over time to include engineering and then entrepreneurship, two disciplines that shared a home in Marlborough’s Engineering & Entrepreneurship Program. Lee eventually became Program Head, and when Frank & Eileen made a founding gift through the brand’s $20M Giving Pledge to launch an accelerator within that program, Lee built it.
Different Paths, Unified Purpose
Audrey came to education through entrepreneurship. She has long believed that entrepreneurship is the most powerful driver of positive change for women and that the biggest impact she can make is by creating more women entrepreneurs. It is why she created the Frank & Eileen Giving Pledge and why she later launched the Frank & Eileen Foundation—both with the mission of unlocking educational opportunities for the next generation.
Lee came to entrepreneurship through education. Watching girls as young as 12 and up develop real businesses, stand in front of audiences, and field hard questions with total composure, she found her conviction: entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful educational frameworks there is, for creative problem-solving, for building agency, for proving to a young person that the distance between an idea and something real is a distance they can cross.
While different paths brought them here, Audrey and Lee are unified by purpose—creating more women entrepreneurs at scale can and will fundamentally change our world for the better.
Building a Better Future
The statistic that has long fueled Audrey and Lee’s mission is this: until age 12, girls’ confidence levels are virtually equal to those of boys’. Then, between the ages of 12 and 13, the percentage of girls who feel they are not allowed to fail more than doubles. It is for this exact reason that Audrey and Lee feel that to create more women entrepreneurs, we must start young. The window is real, and it closes faster than most people realize.
Audrey knows this from the founder’s side. Lee knows it from the classroom. Together, alongside a world-class educational institution, they’re building something designed to reach not only girls, but all young people, before that window closes. Why? Because access to the right tools at the right moment changes what feels possible, bringing the Foundation’s ‘Start Young. Think Big.’ credo to life.
The analytical background both Audrey and Lee share, rooted in engineering, can be rare in the philanthropy space. The Foundation distills everything these two visionary women have learned into a nonprofit that pays their experiences forward: if girls and young women get the right tools as early as middle school, their confidence remains intact, and those big dreams they have as young people are more likely to become the businesses and ideas that will reshape the entrepreneurial landscape, building a better future for all of us.
What’s Next? Introducing Dear Dreamer
The Frank & Eileen Foundation’s first major giving initiative, Dear Dreamer, is almost here!