Outside Greenwich Country Club, it’s a crisp winter evening in a long season of biting Northeastern nights. The valet attendants are racing back and forth from a packed lot. Upon entering the grand clubhouse, the temperature shifts. The buzz from the distant ballroom extends down the hallowed halls as far as the check-in table in the foyer, where young women with impeccable posture direct the guests. They convey warmth and confidence. They do not seem at all out of their element, despite not coming from this privileged world. Maureen Polo, CEO of Hello Sunshine and this evening’s Girls With Impact gala honoree, has lived in Greenwich for 15 years, but she also did not grow up in country club ballrooms.
Hello Sunshine, for those who don’t know (and just think it’s something we hoped to say more often last winter), is the media company founded by Reese Witherspoon, which is devoted to putting women at the center of stories across film (Where the Crawdads Sing), television (The Morning Show, Big Little Lies, Daisy Jones & the Six …), books and podcasts. It is built on the belief that storytelling can change the way women walk through the world.
Girls With Impact, the Greenwich-based nonprofit founded by Jennifer Openshaw to provide business and leadership prep to underprivileged teen girls and women, does that, too. The young women working the event and accepting their Emerging Leader awards illustrate that point. They could seem out of their element in a room with a hefty silver-spoon contingent. But, no. Their heads are held high, their eyes are full of promise, their words are powerful and they know how to claim their space—because women like Polo and Openshaw have showed them how.
Maureen Polo with Girls With Impact CEO Jennifer Openshaw
Long Beach, Long Island: The Shy Storyteller
Maureen Polo grew up the oldest of six, in a small beach town on Long Island called Long Beach. “My mom came from a very traditional Irish Catholic background, and she grew up in a world where she was told she was pretty enough to be a flight attendant, and caring enough to be a teacher, and probably would be a really good nurse if she were, you know, better at math,” recounts Polo. “Those were the options that existed for my mother.”
Polo was quiet—an avid reader and writer, an observer. “I valued my mom so much,” she says. “She was so intelligent. She read everything under the sun. She was deeply engaged in culture and what the world around us was doing.” It was the 1980s, and things were shifting. “My mom said, ‘You can be anything you believe you can be, if you just work hard and you work smart and you read.’ Reading became my outlet to help figure out who I was as a person and what I needed to learn to be successful in life,” says Polo.
Jennifer Openshaw interviewing Maureen at the 2026 Girls With Impact Trailblazer Gala
Girls With Impact COO Carrie Reynolds, Jennifer Openshaw, Girls With Impact graduates Rashana Weerasinghe, Ahmya Andrea and Christina Cevetillo, Maureen Polo
Early on, several teachers had an indelible effect on her. “I ran for class president in fourth grade,” Polo recalls, “and I lost that election. I was sitting in a cement play tunnel in the playground, so devastated I’d lost. My teacher, Roberta Sanders, found me and told me: ‘Leadership isn’t about winning the title. Leadership is about what you do when the chips fall. How do you stand up? How do you tell your story? How do you make sure you’re affecting change through all the other things you do?’ She coaxed me out of that tunnel and reminded me that Day One was the day I lost. Day One of leadership is learning how to stand up in that resilience and figure out how you can take this experience and make yourself stronger. She had such an impact on who I am and how I’ve led as a human and as a leader in my career.” Recently, Polo even tried to find her old teacher to express her gratitude. She had passed, but Polo was able to share the story with Roberta’s daughter.
Her third-grade teacher, Judith Bailey, also shaped her future. “As a child, people called me painfully shy,” she says. “She was the first person who pulled me aside and said, ‘I actually don’t think you’re shy. I think you’re this beautiful storyteller. You write your stories, but you have not found your voice yet. You just don’t communicate in the way that the world does. The best thing you can do for yourself is find your voice and connect what you’re writing with the way you tell stories.’ That really taught me how to be a super-curious person who values how other people think and express themselves.”
If only Ms. Bailey could hear Polo now, delivering a string of inspiring stories at lightning speed, which is something—like at the Girls With Impact gala—she does often.
“It’s so important to reach the next generation and share your vulnerable experiences,” she says. “I get asked to show up in schools or in mentorship communities, and I do it if I can, because that is the way we shape and change the future for women. Those two teachers had a really fundamental impact on me,” says Polo. “I love to teach others, and I think that’s because they did that for me at such a young age.”
Maureen at the 2024 Hello Sunshine Collective, an event that focuses on empowering female voices and building community among changemakers.
Polo saw her mom model resilience, when her parents divorced. “She was taking care of three kids and at night going to nursing school and leaving us with a sitter or relative and trying to give herself an education,” she recalls. “I admired not only her ability to step outside from what she knew, but also her ability to recognize that the world might not have been set up for her, but that I can be the change she didn’t have in the environment she grew up in.”
Polo campaigned for Geraldine Ferraro. “I was so excited that she was the vice presi-dential candidate, and she was a woman,” says Polo, who also watched Sandra Day O’Connor be nominated to the Supreme Court. “Madonna’s music was blaring from my stereo. My parents were pretty conservative, but I was wearing lace gloves and, you know, neon bangles. I was looking at Oprah Winfrey—a storyteller and connector of people—breaking every boundary a woman could break.”
The future looked full of possibility.
Kashif Zafar, Harlan Coben, Eddy Cue, Reese Witherspoon and Maureen at the Bookmarked podcast live recording of Witherspoon and Corban’s book, Gone Before Goodbye
New York: Business Force
Polo was often told she should be a writer, but her altruistic nature told her being a doctor was how you made the world a better place. Then, aptly, a movie changed her mind. “I connected so deeply to Diane Keaton in Baby Boom,” she says. “This is not even a joke. I was thinking I wanted to be a doctor, and then I watched that movie and realized: Oh, I actually really have business acumen. I love the idea of building businesses and telling stories.”
Polo earned a business/communications degree from Loyola and began her career at Condé Nast. “I had incredible role models at Self magazine,” she says. “I had two female leaders, Vicki Wellington and Beth Brenner. They had different skill sets, and they talked about that. One was the publisher, and one was the VP of publishing. One would give the other the mic to answer questions, and the other would give it back. You almost didn’t know which was the publisher, because they were leading the company in a really smart way. If women can see women working in that way, they understand that the more we do together, the more power we have to change.” Polo notes how that’s exactly what Girls With Impact teaches. “There are girls taking these classes together,” she explains. “There’s a community. It’s collaborative.”
Polo’s career took her to Meredith and then Hearst, where she moved up the ranks in director of business development roles. She was a senior vice president at Fullscreen Media and WarnerMedia. Board rooms full of men did not intimidate her. “Many of the jobs I’ve had didn’t exist before I had them,” she explains. “I built a digital business when digital businesses weren’t even a thing yet. I helped build social media ecosystems before social was social. I was this female in a room full of people who were more senior and seasoned than me, predominantly men, and I was trying to explain these new mediums.”
She did not compare herself to men or consider gender an obstacle but was some-times her own roadblock. “When I was in my early thirties, a very senior man who had a lot of faith in me told me I should go after this chief digital officer role,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t have the business school acumen, so I didn’t. That leader came to me after and said: ‘You really should have gone for that job. You have all the skills and tools.’ They didn’t even end up hiring someone who had an MBA. I call those my ‘cement-tunnel’ moments, where I put myself back into that cement tunnel. I just didn’t have the person at that time to sort of pull me out. So, I thought, how can I be that person that pulls someone out of the cement tunnel? That became my mission. But the other part of it for me was how do I get myself to show up, take more risk and push myself outside my comfort zone? I think that was a defining moment for me in my career.”
Maureen with her family: Addison, Hudson, Alan and Grayson
Maureen and her daughter Addison at Shine Away, a two-day experiential event featuring workshops and panels
Maureen with her sons, Hudson and Grayson
Greenwich/L.A.: Hello Sunshine
Through the years, Polo never lost sight of her mother’s advice. “I made sure I kept doing what my mother did and telling the world around me: We can be anything,” she says, “and that’s what Hello Sunshine built its business around. It was so serendipitous that I ended up here. Because that is truly how you change the narrative for women. You show them. You allow them to see stories and opportunities and careers. You give them those roles that allow them to see it’s actually happening. Hello Sunshine has put 91 women in director roles in episodes of our shows.”
The company has a predominantly female executive team, which Polo joined in 2022. She was promoted to CEO last September. “We are creating space for women in these positions and creating an environment that is really positive,” says Polo. “We have to show girls what leadership looks like.” That culture comes from the very top down. “Reese Witherspoon is incredible,” raves Polo. “She is driven, ambitious, kind and generous with the way that she thinks. She’s always 10 steps ahead of where the world is, where culture is. She has this uncanny ability to understand humans and culture and then help shape it. She’s an incredible mom. She’s a role model for all of us, including me.”
Polo and her husband, who have three kids, moved out to Greenwich almost 15 years ago with one toddler at the time. They were both commuting to the city for work, but with his family in Massachusetts and hers on Long Island, it was a happy medium.
“I had a hard time giving up my city place and my city life, so it took me a minute to find my footing. But I love it here and love raising my children here,” she says. “It’s surprising how many other female leaders I have connected with here. There are a lot of really smart, incredible women—even my non-working friends are. They have so much passion and drive, and they’re doing so much for the world.” There are multiple tables full of Polo’s girlfriends cheering her on as she addresses the gala attendees and shares her inspiring stories.
Polo was an obvious choice for the Girls With Impact honoree. Founder Jennifer Openshaw comments, “Maureen embodies what it means to be not just a successful leader, but an exceptional role model. As one of Greenwich’s own, she has used her platform and influence to widen the path for women coming up behind her. She understands that leadership isn’t just about personal success. It’s about lifting others as you rise.”
Maureen and Reese Whitherspoon at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity 2025
The admiration between the women is mutual. “I had to learn on my own through mistakes and hustling hard to figure it all out,” says Polo. “The community Girls With Impact is building for this generation is giving them the tools to be successful and be prepared to go out into the professional world, to give them mentorship, to teach them how to build a network. I didn’t even know what a network was.”
While GWI provides business acumen (to 20,000 girls so far), Hello Sunshine is preparing girls in other ways, including diverting them from the pressure and anxiety induced by social media. “The social ecosystems that they’re playing inside—they can be bright lights, but they’re also dragging them down into places where they shouldn’t be,” explains Polo. “What we’ve done is create a community where this next generation can be more intentional with the way that they spend their time. We call it ‘slowing the scroll,’ creating space for you to connect with yourself and others in more meaningful, joyful ways.”
As a lifelong reader, Polo is passionate about Sunnie Reads, Hello Sunshine’s new book club for Gen Z readers. “If we can show girls these other passion points that are off these platforms, that are in real life and enable you to connect with other humans, they’re going to be more joyful. Sunnie Reads is about giving girls the space to connect over books—get together, read together, create joyful playlists and listen to music together. We want reading to be something these girls can escape into, but also something that connects them. AI is going to shift the way people think and operate. We believe that reading and storytelling, and that connection to story is going to allow the next generation to be critical thinkers and intentional and be able to adapt new technologies in thoughtful ways. But it’s going to be on them to really moderate the way they spend their time.”
As a kid, Polo read “anything and everything. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye was probably my favorite. I’ll love every version of Little Women forever and ever and evermore. I loved The Secret Garden.” These days you might find her reading The Disengaged Teen, a parenting book she is “obsessed with,” or Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play, which addresses how to combat household inequality.
“It’s one of the IPs we own at Hello Sunshine and truly is something that I embody in my house,” says Polo. “I have a husband who’s incredibly involved in my children’s lives and our home lives.” With her husband, Alan Polo, as head of sales & trading at Liquidnet and Polo having a bi-coastal career for the past 15 years, fair play is really the only way.
Polo’s teenage daughter Addison may be the best judge of how it’s all working out. “My mom is the reason I believe hard work and kindness can exist in the same person,” she says. “I’ve watched her lead with confidence, think with purpose and care about people without ever cutting corners. At 16, I’m still figuring out who I want to be, but she’s my inspiration and exactly who I want to be when I grow up.”