How Women Built Networks of Support for Economic Independence

Through oral histories, ‘We Do Declare’ highlights women who created networks of economic support and opened pathways to opportunity and financial independence.

We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence is our oral history project exploring what independence has meant in women’s lives since the 1970s. To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we conducted over 30 oral histories and interviews across the country and listened as American women declared that independence is not only essential but also deeply tied to financial power.

Unwilling to put up with barriers in their way, the women we interviewed played critical roles in advancing women’s financial independence over the last fifty years. These oral histories reveal four interconnected approaches women took to overcome the challenges they faced: passing new laws, creating new networks, finding new data, and building new power. Together, they tell a remarkable story of women’s determination to increase economic power and independence for themselves and others across the United States.

“You Can Move Mountains If You Do It Together” —Dwana Franklin-Davis

Imagine starting a new business as a woman in two different cities. In one, there is a local non-profit offering trainings and small grants, a bank loan manager who is supportive, and a friendly group of entrepreneurs who welcome you to their Thursday evening get-togethers to network. In the other city, there are none of those. For decades, women in many places faced the second scenario. Some of them set about to change that and ended up changing even more.

This group of interviews showcase women whose work targeted specific communities, whether defined by geography or demographics, but had a large impact on women’s economic independence. Since the 1970s, these women and others like them created new support systems in communities across the country, resulting in whole new networks of interconnected organizations and programs designed to bolster women’s economic independence. By working across sectors—connecting non-profit agencies, philanthropic organizations, and corporations—these women supported thousands of individual women in reaching new financial security while building local, regional, and national networks that have made lasting change. The nature of their work means their stories are linked to others in the We Do Declare interviews that can be further explored by clicking on their names and listening to their stories.

Carol Truesdell watched her mother suffer from chronic depression, in part, Truesdell believes, because her mother had been unable to tap into her talents in a career. Truesdell was determined to help other women find fulfillment and be able to support themselves. After many years as a volunteer leader with the Junior League, Truesdell was recruited by Judy Justad in 1978 to co-found CHART, an organization in Minneapolis to assist women looking for more economic independence.

CHART was funded in part through public funds made available for Displaced Homemakers, a direct result of the work Barbara Dudley had done. They also got funding from the McKnight Foundation, now led by Tonya Allen. Truesdell speaks in her interview about the life-changing impact CHART had on individual women. But CHART also was part of a growing network of organizations aimed at supporting women’s economic independence.

In 1982, two years after the first White House Small Business Summit that Virginia Littlejohn recalls, Kathy Keeley and Arvonne Fraser founded Women’s Economic Development Corporation (WEDCO) to support women starting their own businesses in Minnesota. In 1989, CHART and WEDCO made history in the state as the first merger of two non-profits into WomenVenture—an organization still going strong almost forty years later. Truesdell herself went on to lead the Pillsbury Foundation and, despite resistance from male colleagues, made one of the founding grants to the Minnesota Women’s Foundation, which invested more than $5 million in Minnesota communities in 2024.

Bo Thao-Urabe arrived in Minnesota in 1979 as the child of refugees from Laos. She recalls how her mother had to guide her four small children through the jungle to safety toward the end of the Vietnam war because Thao-Urabe’s father, like many other men of the Hmong ethnic group, had fought alongside the United States. As a child growing up in Chicago and then Minnesota, Thao-Urabe saw the many systems her parents had to navigate and took note of what worked and what didn’t in supporting them, their goals, and their hopes for their children.

One of Thao-Urabe’s first jobs after college was helping Wisconsin learn how to do a better job of serving victims of domestic violence. After returning home to Minnesota, she was hired by the Women’s Association of Hmong and Lao, founded in 1979—not long after CHART—as the first Hmong women’s organization in the country. Eventually Thao-Urabe became its Executive Director. She would go on to have a wide-ranging career as a founder and leader of multiple organizations at the state, regional, and national level, always drawing on her family’s experience as a wellspring of insight into how to create systems that genuinely help people.

In 2014, Thao-Urabe co-founded RedGreen Rivers, a social enterprise that supports women artisans in the Mekong River area. Thao-Urabe notes that “Our strategies don't always have to be the big systemic strategies. Sometimes it's enough to make a difference in one person's life.” Thao-Urabe is part of a remarkable network of Hmong women whose work together has made profound changes in the lives of their community, the country, and the world.

Dwana Franklin-Davis grew up in a family where working with computer hardware and for tech companies was the norm, though neither of her parents had a four-year college degree. Franklin-Davis decided to study computer science at Purdue University in large part because she wanted more financial stability than her parents could provide. Despite succeeding in two internships at IBM early in her college years, she felt isolated as one of the only Black women in her field at school and eventually changed her major to business. That early experience shapes her approach at Reboot Representation, the organization she leads.

Founded in 2018, Reboot Representation’s mission was to double the number of Black, Latina, and Native American (BLNA) women graduating with computing baccalaureate degrees by 2025. The early research showed that computing degrees were important launchpads to corporate careers, financial wellbeing, and having a “voice at the table,” but mostly men were obtaining those degrees. BLNA women constituted only four percent of the people graduating with computing degrees in 2016, down by 33% from the previous decade and corporate foundations were investing very little in that particular population. As Reboot’s founding CEO in 2019, Franklin-Davis set about to create a new set of connections and approaches to supporting BLNA women in obtaining computing degrees.

“We focused on pathways. We focused on bridge-builders as compared to gatekeepers. We focused on wraparound supports and services. We focused on community.” In other words, she helped build a whole new network to support BLNA women in obtaining computing degrees—and the result was that they reached their goal of doubling the number of graduates two years early, in 2023. “We did that through collective impact and collective power and collective work,” Franklin-Davis explains. “You can move mountains if you do it together.”

Jaime Gloshay grew up on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in central eastern Arizona. When she got her first job after graduate school, she worked for a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI)—a nonprofit lender—trying to support the local Native American population through loans.

Over time, Gloshay learned more about the long history of her community’s distrust of financial institutions and the barriers they faced to accessing capital. Her early experience at the CDFI was frustrating, but, she recalls, “that's what ... pushed me to think bigger, to dream bigger.”

It was when she met Vanessa Roanhouse, another Dene woman who had just started a new consulting business, that the pieces began to fall into place. Roanhouse brought Gloshay on as a consultant and soon convened a meeting with eight other Native American women from different tribal nations, who together envisioned a new organization called Native Women Lead. Gloshay recalls, “We wanted to build something that was going to empower not just us, but each other.”

They created a proposal called The Future is Indigenous Women and won a ten-million-dollar Equality Can’t Wait award in 2021 from Pivotal Ventures, the same organization that had supported Reboot Representation. “We dreamed up an ecosystem to center and support our Indigenous women,” Gloshay explains. They worked to build connections and community and created a fund to support other Native women’s endeavors. Then, having heard so many stories of Native people being discriminated against by lenders and investors, they created a fellowship to recruit and train more women into positions at financial institutions.

To Gloshay, the economic impact of her work is important, but there are other, less tangible results as well. “There is a ripple effect there that we can't quite grasp or measure or fully articulate, but it's felt, it's experienced, and it's creating ripple effects for all of us.”

These women’s stories, taken together, help us see the intersections between so many other women across the country and even the globe. Their work to make connections between people, organizations, and sectors has had a profound impact, changing the whole landscape within which individual women seek to build their economic independence.

Related Reading:

• Women Who Changed the Laws Shaping Economic Independence
• What Oral Histories Reveal About Women’s Pursuit of Economic Independence
• How Women Researchers Changed Our Understanding of Women’s Economic Lives
• Women Who Reshaped Financial Power and Economic Opportunity

Rachel F. Seidman | Read More

Curator, Smithsonian American Women's History Museum