By Hannah Amos
At 20 years old, Eva Fipps has made history — she’s currently the youngest female mayor in the United States.
Fipps serves Henderson, Iowa, a town of 144 residents, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. Fipps is juggling her mayoral position while being a full-time business administration student, working just under full-time, as well as doing extracurriculars that come with being a 20-year-old college woman with plans to attend law school.
What inspired her to run for election was her relationship with her city clerk, whom she would stop and visit with during her morning runs.
On one of her morning workouts, the clerk suggested Fipps run for mayor. After some encouragement, she decided to try, and now she’s sworn in.
Part of what gave her the confidence to run for office was her time at ALA Iowa Girls State.
Eva Fipps (right) and her best friend from high school.
While attending ALA Girls State, Fipps learned every individual aspect of government throughout the state, from local journalism to the state Senate and House of Representatives. Fipps applied to every position and got city journalist.
Since being sworn in, she has accredited the ALA Girls State program for laying the foundation of knowledge she needed to run and be a successful mayor.
“Every day I look back, and I think of how much ALA Girls State helped me,” she said. “I think of all the small things I learned that you wouldn’t even think about on a day-to-day basis.”
ALA Girls State helped strengthen her skills — like public speaking, small talk, and other people-based skills.
“It definitely helped teach me how to interact with people I might not otherwise have had things in common with,” she said.
ALA Girls State made such a lasting impact on Fipps that she went back as a counselor in 2024 and plans to go back this summer. As a counselor, she had the opportunity to have an outside perspective after having an inside view of the program.
“I got to see from an outside perspective how helpful this can be because I watched girls show up on the first day — barely knowing about how anything worked — and I got to watch them leave talking about what they wanted to do with their futures, how they really loved this opportunity, and how they’d love to continue to do this in real life,” she said.
With ALA Girls State forming a foundation of confidence for her position, Fipps is focusing on using her platform of being the youngest current serving mayor and youngest female mayor to uplift and accomplish tasks for her community.
By the end of her term, she hopes to have an accessible playground in her city and make the water bill payable online, among other smaller goals.
Beyond being a leader for her community with her history-making mayoral triumph hitting the headlines, her leadership has become further reaching than she could imagine.
“There are so many things that make me so proud, not only of myself, but of others,” Fipps said. “I have people who have contacted our city hall just to say that seeing me in this position helped give them the courage to run for a similar or even higher position. So, just the pride in knowing I did something that might give other people courage to do things is extremely high.”
Fipps recognizes that the ALA Girls State programs greatly benefit young girls and women in this transitional moment of life, something she is grateful to have experienced firsthand.
“This is an extremely important opportunity that you can take to further not only your knowledge, but your understanding of how the world works, and when you’re going into adulthood, that’s something very important every student should do,” she said.
