You Need to Find Your People: Ubalda Mensah on Passion, Mentorship, and Building Opportunity for Rural Girls
Key Takeaways
- Opportunity can shape what someone believes is possible. Ubalda’s own access to education, leadership experiences, and scholarships helped build the confidence she now wants to nurture in girls and young women in rural communities.
- Impact does not have to mean reaching everyone. For Ubalda, knowing that even 20 women could gain skills that improve their livelihoods is enough to make the work meaningful.
- Passion alone cannot sustain nonprofit work. Ubalda learned that building an organization also requires structure, systems, mentorship, and people willing to share what they have learned.
- Nonprofit work was never meant to be done alone. Finding peers and mentors who can listen, offer guidance, share resources, and understand the realities of the work has been an important part of Ubalda’s journey.
Ubalda Mensah knows firsthand what access to opportunity can make possible.
Growing up in Wenchi, Ghana, a strong education helped her build confidence and recognize what she was capable of. Today, through Upward Motion Foundation, she is working to create more of those opportunities for girls and young women in rural communities, while learning something equally important along the way: passion can start the work, but community, mentorship, and structure help sustain it.
From Receiving Opportunity to Creating It for Others
Ubalda grew up in a low-income home in Wenchi, in Ghana’s Central Region. Her parents wanted her to have the best education they could provide, and that opportunity became an important foundation for everything that followed.
At school, she participated in quiz competitions, took on leadership roles, and even had the opportunity to speak on the radio. By the time she reached senior high school, Ubalda had developed a strong sense of herself and what she could accomplish.
“I was so empowered. I knew who I was and what I had the ability and capacity to do. I was confident.”
Scholarships helped her continue through senior high school and university, but Ubalda was also increasingly aware that many girls growing up around her did not have access to the same opportunities.
After senior high school, she began volunteering with CAMFED as a transitions guide, supporting girls as they moved from school into further education, employment, or entrepreneurship. The experience deepened something that had already been growing in her.
“Through that experience, I developed a greater passion for ensuring that girls from rural communities get to achieve whatever they want to achieve.”
Ubalda did not simply want to support girls once they reached a transition point. She wanted to reach them earlier, during the years when their confidence, ambitions, and understanding of what might be possible were still developing.
While at university, she started Upward Motion Foundation.
Today, the organization works with girls and young women in rural communities where access to jobs and other opportunities can be limited. Its work includes skills training, mentorship, and educational support, all rooted in helping girls believe they can pursue the goals they have for themselves.
For Ubalda, the work is deeply personal. She knows how different her own path might have looked without people willing to invest in her education and potential.
When One Person Moving Forward Is Enough
Running a nonprofit has also taught Ubalda that creating opportunity is rarely simple.
She describes a recent skills training program her organization was preparing to offer to 100 young women. The 20-day training was free, including the raw materials and equipment participants would need.
Transportation, however, became a point of tension. Some potential participants said they would not attend unless their transportation costs were also covered.
For Ubalda, it was frustrating. She was looking at an opportunity that could help someone develop a skill and potentially earn an income, and struggling with why that opportunity did not always feel like enough.
At the same time, she recognizes that participants approach the opportunity from different circumstances. Many of the women do see the value of the training and want to participate, and that is where Ubalda keeps returning her attention.
Some participants are graduates who are currently at home without employment. One woman she spoke with is raising a child on her own and sees the training as an opportunity to improve her family’s circumstances.
Those individual possibilities keep Ubalda grounded.
“Even if we just have 20 people, these 20 people are going to get a skill that will improve their livelihood and, in turn, improve their communities. That alone is enough for me.”
It is a perspective that brings impact back to the individual people behind the numbers. For Ubalda, improving one or two people’s circumstances is not insignificant. Knowing that someone may move from where they are today toward something better gives her hope to keep going.
Passion Can Start the Work, But It Cannot Carry Everything
Ubalda started her nonprofit journey with enormous energy. She travelled, spent her own money and the small stipend she was receiving, and gave what she could because she believed deeply in the work.
But experience eventually taught her something passion alone had not: she needed structure, systems, and people who had already learned lessons she was only beginning to encounter.
“Personally, I believe that nonprofit journey is not a journey you can do on your own. Especially if you’re a young person starting out who is so high on passion, you definitely need community.”
Meeting nonprofit professionals who were further along in their own journeys changed how Ubalda approached her work. Instead of having to figure everything out herself, she could learn from people who understood both the purpose behind the work and the practical realities of building an organization.
That kind of support has become part of how Ubalda thinks about nonprofit leadership itself.
“I don’t think that any person at all, whether young or old, you should do nonprofit alone. You need to find your people.”
It is a simple statement, but one that carries particular weight in a sector where people can become accustomed to stretching themselves, solving the next problem, and continuing forward because the mission matters.
Caring deeply about the work does not mean you have to know how to do all of it yourself.
Finding Mentorship Through The Nonprofit Hive
One of the relationships that has shaped Ubalda’s journey began through a Hive Chat.
Through The Nonprofit Hive, she connected with fellow Ghanaian nonprofit professional Raymond Amezado. What started as a conversation developed into an ongoing mentorship.
“He’s always ready to guide me. He’s always ready to share resources with me. He has been an instrumental part of my growth in this journey.”
The relationship is an example of what Ubalda believes nonprofit community can look like at its best. It is not simply meeting another professional or adding another contact. It is having someone willing to share what they know, listen when things are difficult, and offer guidance informed by their own experience.
“You need to find people who are as equally passionate as you are, and are willing to learn and to teach, people who are willing to listen to all your ranting, and provide some form of advice and some form of counsel.”
Sometimes nonprofit professionals need a resource. Sometimes they need someone who has been there before. And sometimes they simply need a person who understands why today’s problem feels so heavy.
Building the Work Without Carrying It Alone
Five years into building Upward Motion Foundation, Ubalda is still deeply connected to the community where her own story began.
Her work is rooted in a belief that girls in rural communities deserve opportunities to discover their own capacity earlier, before limited resources or circumstances narrow what they imagine for themselves. But her experience has also shaped how she thinks about the people doing this work.
The same idea runs through both parts of Ubalda’s story: people grow when they have access to opportunity, guidance, and others willing to walk alongside them.
For the girls Ubalda works with, that can mean skills training, education, or mentorship. For Ubalda herself, it has meant finding nonprofit peers and mentors willing to share what they have learned.
Nonprofit work may begin with someone deciding they care enough to do something. Sustaining it is rarely an individual act.
As Ubalda has learned, you need structure. You need people willing to teach and people willing to listen. And every so often, you need someone who understands the work well enough to hear you out before helping you figure out what comes next.
You need to find your people.