Rebecca Holmberg Jensen

For me, it’s a privileged position to be able to understand power as something that, in true Pippi style, is about throwing yourself into things you haven’t tried before. Isn’t it just a fact of life that there’s a first time for everything? Power is about more than that. It’s about doing things despite difficult circumstances. When your starting line is 100 metres behind the others, but you insist on joining the race because you’ve realized that life is a marathon, not a sprint, and therefore the first 100 metres are not crucial. Having been placed in care as a child, it wasn’t written in the stars that I would graduate from high school with a double-digit GPA or make it through university while increasingly caring for a mentally ill and homeless mother. As a parent of a nursery-age child with a demanding job and full-time studies, people shook their heads at me when I started my own business. Today, our products are sold in several Danish stores and we partnered with Estee Lauder Company the week before I finished my thesis. When I announced that my little family of three would be volunteering as a RedBarnet Friendship Family for a socially disadvantaged 7-year-old boy, I was met with: “Well, you don’t even have family in Copenhagen to help you with the child you already have?” “No,” I replied, “but we do it anyway.” Mobilizing the power to do things despite difficult circumstances requires a focus beyond yourself, a focus on leaving the world a better place than when you arrived, a focus on being someone’s role model. As humans and as a society, we have a responsibility to help each other achieve despite difficult circumstances. Despite gender, ethnicity and social class.