Elizabeth Engele

Co-Founder, MakerGirl

Chicago

Elizabeth is a designer for social good. She grew up on a family-owned farm in Southern Illinois where she felt the gap in diversity and innovative learning which is why she sought to take advantage of every opportunity to learn and challenge herself at the University of Illinois. In a social entrepreneurship class in 2014, she was challenged to create a solution to something that bothered her and immediately thought of the lack of women makers and builders she felt on her campus. This issue led her to researching why girls don’t pursue Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. Girls don’t pursue STEM because they don’t think it’s creative nor do they think they can make an impact and that children shut out new opportunities for learning around age eleven. Elizabeth designed themed MakerGirl sessions, which take girls all the way from design thinking to holding a tangible item, to show girls that STEM is creative, technical, and any pre-existing passion can be combined with STEM. After a few sessions, Elizabeth and her co-founder, Julia, realized MakerGirl was not reaching girls in rural and under-served locations so they led their team to raise over $80K in Kickstarter and in-kind donations to create #MakerGirlGoesMobile—a truck that takes MakerGirl sessions on the road. Since its 2014 inception, MakerGirl has educated over 3,800 girls in twenty-two states and has academies at University of Illinois, Northwestern University, Cambridge, University of Texas at Austin, University of Michigan, and University of California, San Francisco.

The joy of building the MakerGirl experience propelled Elizabeth to pursue her Master’s in Design at Illinois Institute of Technology’ Institute of Design (ID) where she is enhancing the MakerGirl experience and building other meaningful experiences for children. Prior to ID, she spent four years working at LinkedIn in nonprofit sales, recruiting and operations through their Business Leadership Program. She serves in the children's and global ministries at Park Community Church and enjoys competing in the Chicago triathlon, reading thirty books, and travelling to one new country a year.