“If we want to see more female leaders in the world, this is how we do it.”

In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people, with different perspectives, who feel they can offer more to the workplace – from the water cooler all the way up to C-Suite.

Everything changed for Tammy Darcy when she turned 14. “The first 13 years were great, but the next weren’t so much,” she says via Zoom from her Waterford home. As she entered her second year of secondary school, a series of events took place that changed the course of her life forever. “It was one of those perfect storms of family life being really hectic and stressful, and school life being really hectic and stressful, and just kind of living in survival mode at all times.” Darcy’s family had already dealt with their fair share of trauma – one of her sisters passed away when their family was young, deeming the question of “how many siblings do you have?” more difficult to answer – but it was when her parents decided to separate, that Darcy felt the world crumble under her feet. “That was really, really stressful,” she says. “At that age, you notice the way the adults around you are acting, and yet are still doubting yourself because they’re the ones that are supposed to have all the answers.”

During that same year, Darcy’s older sister Shona – 15 to her 14 – began showing signs of serious illness. “Our parents didn’t really make us aware of it,” she says. “But she was struggling with school, her balance, her ability to retain information. She was getting confused, like she’d tell you a story, and then tell you the same thing a few minutes later. And then this one day, she had been out on her bike, and all of a sudden somebody pulled up to the house in a car with her in the front and her bike in the boot. She’d literally just fallen off the bike in front of them, and they brought her home. Another time, we were on a walk and her legs stopped working. Things escalated very quickly from there.” Shona was eventually diagnosed with Arteriovenous Malformations, a type of acquired brain injury which saw her health deteriorate and doctors diagnose an end-of-life date within the year. Mercifully, she fought expectations, living for another 30 years, but the stress of that time caused profound effects on her younger sister, Tammy. “I was a straight-A student, captain of every team, the most popular kid in the class, until that year,” she says. “And then, because of those challenges that I faced, I wasn’t even going to school by the end of the year. I was quite seriously bullied and completely isolated from my friends. I didn’t trust anybody. I had a really bad attitude. I had a lot of anger, and ended up doing all the textbook rebellious things; black nails, goth phases, all the rest. I didn’t have any value in myself and got into relationships and friendships with people who didn’t treat me very well. It took me a long time to come back from that, and I’m really lucky that I did because a lot of girls and women don’t.”

At 18, Tammy became pregnant. “I didn’t go to college directly after school, because I couldn’t,” she says now. “It’s a tricky thing to remember that time – and I do think your memories can deceive you – because it was incredibly hard. Nothing feels difficult after that. I was a single parent, too, which made things all the more difficult. But it was also the best thing that ever happened to me.” She returned to education at 25, graduating with an honours degree in Human Resources Management, followed by an MA in Business Management in Social Enterprise a few years later. However, despite enjoying her work and landing a great career, Darcy felt a calling from deep within her. She felt that had she had the right support, information, and guidance when she really needed it, she may have been better equipped to overcome the challenges she faced as a teen. “It was something I always thought about,” she says. “I probably had been thinking about it for five years before I said anything to anyone.” Then, one day, in the middle of her Masters of Education course, she was asked to do a micro-teaching session. “We had to come up with a workshop and deliver it to the class. Of course, I already had nearly word for word decided what I would do. Afterwards, everyone in my class said I should be doing that for a living. So, I called my husband and asked him to meet me to discuss it. Now, my husband would be quite risk-averse, so I expected him to bring up worries or talk about the insecurity of it all. So, when he said I needed to be doing this, I thought… Oh crap, this is really happening.”

Darcy began brainstorming, thinking during every spare minute she had, and making plans. “I began reaching out to schools and working with teachers, and in 2017 I went part-time in work. I thought about marketing, accounts, funding… I applied for a fund in 2018 which allowed me to leave work and pay my salary for a year, which was a huge opportunity. So I took a year off work and set up The Shona Project for two years on my own. Then I got one employee, then two, then three… And as of this month, we have 11 employees. And, as well as that, in the last year we reached 180,000 girls. So it has been that fast in terms of growth. That said, it’s not all about numbers. I set The Shona Project up because I really felt that’s what I needed in my time of need was somebody to simply check up on me. That’s all it took, I didn’t need to be saved or whatever – I just needed guidance, direction and a listening ear.”

The Shona Project is an award-winning organisation which provides support and mentorship to young women and girls in Ireland. Covering topics like mental health, bullying, body issues, self-esteem, relationships, medical concerns and school and exams, it tackles young woman-centric issues head-on by way of school workshops, community visits, festivals and ambassador and mentorship programmes, something they’ve just launched in recent months. “Our mission is to educate, empower and inspire today’s Irish girls to become tomorrow’s strong, confident and curious young women,” she says. “When you think about how girls are influenced, it’s in school and online. So, we’ve created a voice which allows them to feel empowered – and one that ensures someone else’s standards do not define them. It’s very much a movement driven by the girls, but we’re growing in lots of different ways. Some of our programs are more about raising awareness and challenging perceptions, while others are about deep, impactful life-changing interventions. Ultimately, we hope that the girls we work with through those interventions will, in turn, go out and be the same level of influence in their communities and create the same change that we’ve managed to facilitate for them, too.”

Over the years, Darcy’s work has been recognised nationally and internationally for its huge importance. In 2021, she took home the Irish Red Cross Humanitarian of the Year and, in 2024 she was announced as a European Leader with The Obama Foundation. She regularly appears on TV, radio, podcasts and newspapers and has been invited to speak to royalty about her work. She is also a published author and released her first book, You’ve Got This, a resource for young women in 2021. “I’m always doing a course of some description,” she laughs, as I ask her how she does it all. “I graduated as a celebrant last year, I’ve done courses in Technology Transfer and Patenting, and loads of other accelerator courses on Social Change and Social Impact. And I’m on another program at the moment. So yeah, every year I’m doing something, because I feel like at the rate at which The Shona Project is growing, I need to grow at that rate to be able to keep up with it and to do it justice.”

The Shona Project recently undertook an enormously extensive survey to find out just what exactly it’s like to be a young girl today – and what exactly might be needed to help. “The findings might be quite stark for some people, but they’re not surprising to us,” Darcy says. “Obviously, confidence, pressure, mental health, and specifically anxiety, are huge challenges. But so are rivalry, judgment and exclusion. We see a lot of girls just basically in survival mode, like I was back in the day. It was bad before the pandemic, but it’s been hugely exacerbated ever since. You know, if you think about a girl’s experience daily, she can feel horrified, helpless, worried, insecure, scared and untrusting before she even gets out of bed in the morning. She’s looking for opportunities, but doesn’t see them, and she knows that she will have to fight harder and be louder, better, and quicker off the mark than her male counterparts. And then, on social media, she sees anywhere between 6000-10,000 adverts that are going to tell her that she’s not good enough. These things can look small, but when you put them all together, it’s like a perfect storm of bombardment and brainwashing that you’re just never going to be good enough.” To counteract this, Darcy says a complete overhaul of how we look at, talk to and consider young women and girls has to happen first. “What we have to do is be louder than that, and be that voice that’s constantly there, reminding them to challenge those messages, even just to be aware of them. Many of them are subliminal, and we meet so many parents who just really are not equipped to deal with this.”

So, what’s a parent, teacher or member of society who wants to help to do? “Number one, talk to them,” Darcy says. “Not in a judgy way. And also, actually, as parents, I think we tend to panic and minimise – I’ve done it myself because I go to the worst-case scenario. So, I think listen, don’t judge and be genuinely curious about their experiences. Secondly, educate yourself. It’s hard, because things change so fast with social media, with news cycles and everything… But just make sure you’re educated. And then the other thing I would say is inflate their confidence as much as you possibly can. We kind of come from a culture in Ireland where we don’t want to give anyone an ego, so people can find that hard, but inflating their confidence is so important – because the second they go out the door, that confidence will be chipped away at bit by bit. So don’t think that you can overdo it and really just focus on highlighting as much as you can. Highlight what you think is great or interesting about them, and focus on their strengths. Because that trickles down into everything they do, and impacts everybody. So if we want to see more female leaders in the world, this is how we do it.”

A group of female Fitzgerald Power employees have signed up to The Shona Project’s mentorship programme, a national initiative for senior cycle secondary school girls who are seeking positive role models and career inspiration. Running over 9 months, those involved will meet with their mentee monthly online to give focused support and build trusting relationships with inspirational working women. For more information, check out details of the programme here.

For more information on Tammy, check out her LinkedIn here, or find out more about The Shona Project on their website here