Brooklyn hair stylist starts beauty school for impoverished Indian girls
When Brooklyn resident Heather Packer heard Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s question, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” her answer was to go to Rishikesh, India and teach impoverished young women how to be hair stylists and entrepreneurs.
Rishikesh is just 20 minutes from the sacred Ganges River, its banks filled with crowds of people, cows (and cow dung), beggars and dogs. Girls there are discouraged from getting an education and many are married off in their young teens.
Packer, 40, who has lived in the Prospect Heights neighborhood for 12 years, practices yoga and meditation. She launched a non-profit called Fearless Beauty (http://fearlessbeauty.org) and opened her school in 2015 in the Khushi Project Vocational Center where she had been volunteering for several years. There, the girls, many of whom had never held a pair of scissors, learned how to cut, style and color hair.