Connecting the dots: Sarah Greisdorf (CAS’20)

Written by Rebecca Beyer | Published November 2024

Not long after Sarah Greisdorf (CAS’20) moved to New York to start a job at the website builder Squarespace in the summer of 2021, the Maryland native found herself with a wide open social calendar for the then-foreseeable future. She didn’t know many people in the Big Apple; the city, country, and world were still contending with a global pandemic, and she was lonely.

“I got out a notebook,” she remembers. “And I wrote down everyone I knew in the city that I could connect with.”

After making some initial invitations to those on her list, she basically hasn’t had a blank spot on her calendar since.

Greisdorf, a computer science major who describes herself as “way too social,” knows not everyone is predisposed to such intentional outreach. That’s one reason she created Holdette, a series of monthly community groups and gatherings for people who identify as women who have graduated from college in the past five years.

“Not everyone is so methodical,” she says. “So through Holdette we hold the space for new friendships to form.”

The space is intimate. Holdette groups—there are 11 in seven different cities around the country—meet in the homes of hosts trained by Greisdorf to create an inclusive and welcoming environment for other young women. Since Greisdorf launched Holdette in its current form in 2021, more than 1,000 members have gathered for snacks, conversation, and connection in homes in New York; Boston; Chicago; Washington, DC; Seattle; Portland; and Los Angeles. Holdette members—previously strangers—have served as maids of honor in each other’s weddings and gone on to become friends and roommates. In June, the community received a $25,000 grant from Hinge, DoSomething Strategic, and the Foundation for Social Connection for its work to redefine how young people find in-person belonging and connection.

“Of course, I want this community to grow and to have a really big impact,” Greisdorf says. “But I really just want people to make meaningful friendships. The Hinge grant is a nice celebration of and investment in that work.”

In Search of Pockets

Holdette has evolved over the years. As a freshman at BU, Greisdorf turned a passion for finding women’s clothes with practical pockets into a newsletter curating such clothes, a website where people could buy them, and eventually a line of her own business suits.

“There were a lot of dot-dot-dots” connecting the ideas, she says.

Along the way, she received financial support and mentorship from Innovate@BU and BU Spark!, the innovation and experiential learning lab where she worked as a program coordinator. She also received legal advice from BU Law’s BU/MIT Student Innovations Law Clinic.

Greisdorf, who graduated from BU in three years, was on the cusp of launching her suits when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“I was trying to nail down a fabric supplier from my South Campus dorm room,” she remembers. “When things shut down, I had this young, female audience I had been rallying and nothing to give them.”

Greisdorf and her team decided to create a virtual community based around mentorship and career advice for her followers. What began as about 20 young women meeting online for book and podcast discussions became live YouTube events featuring recruiters from major companies such as Tesla, Hulu, and Facebook and attended by thousands of people who were—like Greisdorf—newly graduated and searching for their next step.

She credits the entrepreneurial support she received at BU with helping her shift gears during a difficult time.

“The trust they had in me made me trust that I was doing something worth investing in,” she says. “They were investing in me rather than in my idea. That gave me the confidence and comfort to pivot as it felt necessary.”

In December 2020, when Greisdorf learned about yet another delay from her manufacturing partner due to COVID-19, she called her mentor, distraught.

“She was like, ‘You’re having so much more fun running this community—maybe you don’t actually like making clothes,’” Greisdorf says. “She said, ‘You don’t have to do this anymore.’ The second she said that, I exhaled.”

Bridging the Gap to Adulthood

In 2021, Greisdorf decided to pivot again, recognizing that her online community members were facing an already difficult milestone (post-college life) in an even more difficult moment (a global pandemic). She hosted the first in-person Holdette group in her Manhattan apartment when her couch was still in its box.

“We used the box as a table for our bowl of popcorn, and, after we finished our conversation, everyone stayed and helped me put the couch together,” she says.

All along, the idea behind Holdette—the name is a feminine twist on the purpose of pockets—was to support women as they began their professional journeys: with a place to put their things, with career advice through an online community, and, in Holdette’s current form, with meaningful friendships.

By design, most members stay for a season or two (Holdette groups run in the spring, summer, and fall for three to four months at a time) before moving on once they feel settled in their new city.

Greisdorf says most of Holdette’s new members come from Facebook housing groups where people are looking for apartments or roommates. She posts about her community and gets messages from thousands of young women each year. “I get girls DMing me saying: ‘This is exactly what I was looking for,’ ‘Thank goodness you’re doing this.’ Of course, they don’t all sign up, but how could I stop holding space for that? It’s so special knowing someone feels supported in the place they’ve decided to call home.