The Connector in Me
I have a particular gift. I meet someone doing something meaningful and my brain immediately starts cross-referencing. Who else needs to know about this? Who in my network has been waiting for exactly this person? What happens if these worlds touch?
I've started to make more and more connections recently. It feels like coming home.
This summer it's been running at full speed, and I think I know why.
I rejoined the board of SFMade 9 months ago. SFMade exists to support local manufacturers — the people who actually make things in the Bay Area, which turns out to be harder to do every year as space gets expensive, supply chains get complicated, and the city's attention drifts toward the next tech cycle. Getting back into that orbit reminded me of something I believe deeply: cities need makers. Not just for the economy, but for their soul.
And then I met Julia Gottlieb and Lisa Mishima.
Julia and Lisa are the founders of Ladysmith, a San Francisco collective built around a simple and powerful idea — that the women running small businesses in this city deserve to be seen. Their project, Women of SF, is a portrait series featuring twelve female founders photographed in their own spaces, speaking in their own words. Workshops. Storefronts. Kitchens. Studios. The places where the actual work happens.
I sat with them for an hour and left with that particular feeling I've learned to trust — the one that says: this matters, and I have something to offer here.
What stayed with me was a problem I've heard described different ways but that always lands in the same place. The resources exist. There are grants, city programs, funding initiatives, retail incubators, networks — real support built for small women-owned businesses. But the women who need them most are too busy running their businesses to find them. Too lean on time, bandwidth, and sometimes on the financial literacy that makes navigating these systems feel possible. The money is out there. The path to it isn't always clear.
So I started doing what I do.
I've been making calls, sending emails, pulling threads. I reached out to my friend Mallun Yen, the founder of Operator Collective to think about what impact investing could look like for micro-manufacturers when the return isn't 10x but is urban vitality and women's economic stability. I introduced Ladysmith to Anne Devereux-Mills the founder of my new beloved women’s networking group, Parlay House, because the women in those rooms need to know the women behind these businesses. I've been mapping the funding landscape for women owned businesses including the city's Vacant to Vibrant program, state and county resources that are sitting unclaimed. ( If anyone out there has additional leads for me, please send them my way!)
I'll be honest about something else too. The last few years took something from me. COVID isolation, then a long injury and recovery that kept me smaller and quieter than I'm built to be. I didn't fully realize how much I had contracted until I started expanding again — until I started walking into rooms, making introductions, feeling that particular aliveness that comes from being useful in exactly the way you're meant to be useful.
Meeting Julia and Lisa, getting back to the SFMade board, making these connections — it feels less like a new project and more like coming back to myself. A kind of healing that happens not in stillness but in motion, in community, in the work of helping other people find each other.
There's a larger vision underneath all of this that I'm still working out. What if women's circles of connection — the kind that Parlay House creates, the kind that Ladysmith is documenting, the kind I spend my professional life building inside organizations — what if those circles became an actual economic support infrastructure? Not just inspiration and visibility, but access. Warm introductions to the right funders. Navigation help for grants. A network that actively moves resources toward the people who've been running too hard to go looking for them.
Women-owned manufacturing in the Bay Area is my corner of that work right now. I don't know exactly what shape it takes from here. But I'm awake to it in a way I haven't been in a long time, and that feels worth connecting to!
