Jean L. Chou, Esq. passed the bar exam in 2009, the same year she began building a strong client base for her firm, JLC & Associates. The real estate firm celebrated their 10-year anniversary in May, amidst planning for an office move, a transition to remote working and of course, the Covid-19 pandemic.

If you think starting a law firm is an easy task (you probably don’t, it sounds objectively difficult), then consider the most recent statistics for women in legal fields. According to the American Bar Association’s 2019 Commission on Women, as of April 2019, women made up 38% of staff in legal professions as opposed to the 62% of men working in law. And then, of course, there’s the ever-pervasive pay gap. As of 2018, women lawyers made 80% of male lawyers’ salaries. 

Despite these daunting barriers, Chou speaks of her legal practice with the ease and confidence of someone who knows exactly where she’s meant to be. When describing the seeds of her trailblazing career path, she recounts an interest in entrepreneurship from an early age. Chou  laughs as she recalls selling soap bars on Ebay in high school over summer break: “I’ve always been really drawn towards having something of my own.”

Chou built JLC & Associates to be a firm that practices law with compassion and integrity. Her team represents a host of clients, from business owners looking for commercial leasing to individuals looking to purchase or sell a home. Her firm offers pro bono work to organizations that actively support their communities, including GLAAD and the New York City Bar Justice Center. 

“It’s been a really humbling, eye opening journey because a lot of us (women in business) entered 2020 with certain visions of growth. I think you really start to test your own values and integrity when you’re facing a loss or the opposite of what you perceive as success.” 

Much like the values that her law firm promotes, Chou rose to the occasion with compassion and integrity. She worked to keep her staff employed and adapted to the changes in business throughout the pandemic. Her perseverance reflects the values she sees in her mother, a practicing dermatologist. 

Chou’s mother immigrated to the United States from Kaohsiung, a city in southern Taiwan. When she was 33, she started medical school while pregnant with Chou. As she reflects on her upbringing, she describes her mother with admiration: “I think I’ve inherited her work ethic…She always said as long as you work hard for it, it’ll come. It just reminds you to focus on long term goals.”

It is clear that Chou’s propensity toward thorough, long-term planning contributes to her effective leadership style. I was inspired by her assured and professional demeanor, even in the face of a global emergency. Chou’s moments of vulnerability as she described her family only highlight the combination of strength and humanity that true leadership requires. 

Tegan Miller juggled a lot of jobs before founding MTC Music Academy. Thanks to her many talents (and NYC’s exorbitant rent), Miller’s professional music career has included voice coaching, music directing, choral conducting, teaching music to both adults and children, and performing live. 

After years of freelance work, Miller noticed the joy she felt from voice coaching and how little time she had to devote to teaching. “I wanted to teach on my own terms, on my own schedule and teach the methodologies that I believe in most,” she explains. She hired a business coach for some extra guidance and thus, MTC was born. 

MTC stands for Musicianship, Technique and Confidence, the three pillars that support Miller’s pedagogical philosophy. It is clear to me that her own foundational creative beliefs reinforce the core values of her academy. “Music is for everyone. I believe that people have everything they need inside of them, they just need a little guidance,” she confidently asserts.   

Miller opened up her academy to students in December 2019. Just as she began to find her footing as a new business owner, pandemic safety procedures forced her to quickly adapt to online teaching and learning. 

 In fact, she recently moved to Georgia and plans to expand MTC to her new home state in addition to furthering the development of the New York location. Additionally, she channeled her love of music into a women’s choir that she led via Zoom throughout quarantine. 

The same week that the theatre world paused all programming to stop the spread of Covid-19, Marla Louissaint prepared herself to begin tech rehearsals in what would’ve been her Public Theater debut. As her quarantine continued, images and videos of Black people murdered at the hands of police spread with relentless frequency.

The overwhelming combination of state sanctioned violence and growing civil unrest dropped a match in Louissaint’s reserve of emotional gasoline; she’d had enough. She partnered with Dimitri Joseph Moise, a fellow actor, activist and national HIV spokesperson. In just two months, Louissaint and her network built Claim Our Space Now, a non profit organization that facilitates what she describes as the “swiss army knife of activism.”

The need for organization and correct information fueled Louissaint’s concerns in regards to the activism surrounding the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as the fight to dismantle white supremacy. She explains, “I truly do see a lack of resources for people…If we want to be steadfast in this fight, we have to have a trusted source of information that’s fact checked – that’s beyond journalism and Instagram.” 

The organization provides a wide variety of offerings including a national resource directory. Anyone in need of support can search through helpful filters like “Queer Safe Spaces,” “Reproductive Health” and “Legal Aid/Bail Funds” in order to connect with the organization’s vetted resources. Additionally, Claim Our Space Now partnered with HeadCount.org, GLAAD, Swing From Home and Drag Out the Vote for their Claim the Vote initiative. Through their work with these advocacy organizations, the team aims to educate new voters and ensure that intersectional and intergenerational communities are counted in the census and registered to vote.

Under Louissaint’s mission to ‘Inspire’, the organization promotes Black artists from a variety of mediums. The site features its multifaceted founder modeling in a series of photos that she curated. Louissaint strives to visually represent a Black woman’s journey to empowerment in her work: “She’s stepping into her power, into her sexuality (despite) whatever they call her – a jezebel or the strong Black woman trope…She stands in her truth.”

A model, activist, performer, and computer science major at Fordham University, Louissaint reflects on how her many skills inform her style of leadership. “I realized I can use my computer science knowledge and I can also use my love of art, knowing that art is the true vehicle that’s been at the helm of every revolution.”