As the concept of retiring in a few years from Woman’s Co-op approaches, people have started to talk to me about legacy. About winding things down. About what comes next for me.
I understand the question—but I’ve never fully felt it in the way it’s often asked.
Yes, this is my story in the sense that I helped start the Co-op. I was somehow blessed to be its leader for more than twenty years. But that has never been the heart of it. The real story—the truer, fuller, more beautiful story—is so much bigger than me.
The story of Woman’s Co-op is the story of every woman who walked through our doors unsure if she belonged and left knowing she mattered. It is the story of members, interns, staff, board members, partners, and volunteers who lent their time, their courage, their ideas, and their hearts. It is a living, breathing narrative made up of thousands of individual journeys, woven together into something stronger than any one of us.
I don’t see myself as the owner of this story. I see myself as someone who was invited into it—and allowed to stay for a long time.
What feels especially meaningful to me now is not how my chapter ends, but how the story continues.
There is a particular beauty in knowing that the work will be carried forward by someone whose own journey began here at the Co-op. A woman who came to us as a member, then grew into a trainee, a trainer, and eventually my assistant. Watching her transformation has been one of the great privileges of my career.
I’ve watched her heal. I’ve watched her find her voice, her purpose, her passion. I’ve watched her fall in love with the people who make up this Co-op—not in an abstract way, but in the deep, human, sometimes messy way that real community demands. To know that she will carry this work forward, shaped not just by policy and practice but by lived experience, allows me to imagine stepping away with peace and confidence. That is a story I can be fully satisfied with.
And then there is Valerie—my right hand, my constant.
Over the years, we have watched the nonprofit world rise and fall around us. Organizations have come and gone. Leaders have cycled in and out. But Valerie has remained, living and breathing the Co-op alongside me. Our relationship has been forged not just in strategy meetings and long days, but in shared values, shared burdens, and shared belief in what this place means.
Our families became part of that story too.
My family. Her family. Our children growing up alongside the Co-op, shaped by it in ways they didn’t always choose but ultimately came to understand. My son was barely six years old when strangers began entering our lives in the name of this work—some experiences wonderful, others difficult. Today, full circle, he serves as our lead case manager for men. There is no one better suited for that role, because he understands the Co-op not as a program, but as a way of being. He gets it at a cellular level.
Valerie’s daughter grew up Co-op too, carrying her own version of this shared history. These layers—personal, professional, generational—are not footnotes to the story. They are the story.
That is why I resist the idea of legacy as something that belongs to one person.
The legacy of Woman’s Co-op does not belong to me. It belongs to all of us.
It belongs to the women who found their footing here. To the staff who stayed when it was hard. To the board members who believed when belief was required. To the families who shared with us in the work. To the next leaders who will carry it forward, shaped by the same values but ready to write new chapters.
If my role in this story is nearing its close, I am grateful—not because the story ends, but because it doesn’t.
The story continues. And I am honored to have been a part of it.
Also before any rumors start flying I am not retiring for a few more years.