A Celebration of Women’s History Month: Leaders Then and Now

Sojourner’s Truth Staff

Clara Brown was born into slavery in Virginia in 1800. She married another save when she was 18 and together they had four children. In 1835, Brown’s family was broken apart when they were all sold to different slave owners. Clara was sold to a plantation owner in Kentucky. When she was 56, she was granted her freedom and, as suh, was required by law to leave the state. She worked her way West as a cook and laundress to Denver, Colorado.

Brown settled in the mining town of Central City, Colorado where she worked as a laundress, cook and mid-wife. With the money she saved, she invested in properties and mines in nearby towns.
 

Maggie Lena Walker chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia during the early years of the 20^th century and served as the bank’s first president – the first black woman to charter a bank in the United States.

She later served as chairman of the board of directors when the bank merged with two other Richmond banks to become The Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, which grew to serve generations of Richmonders as an African-American owned institution.

Sarah Breedlove, born in 1867, would become known as Madam C.J. Walker, an American entrepreneur who was the country’s first black female millionaire. Walker made her fortune by developing and marketing a successful line of beauty and hair products for black women under the company she founded – Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.

Walker’s line of products would be born of necessity. She herself experienced scalp disorder and the loss of hair because of the harsh products like lye that were included in soaps used to clean hair.  She learned a lot about hair care from her brothers who owned a barbershop in St. Louis.

She eventually became a commissioned sales agent for an African American hair care entrepreneur, Anni Turnbo Malone, and adapted her own knowledge of products. She then moved to Denver, CO, to work on her products and trained women to become “beauty culturists.” In 1906 she developed a mail order operation and began traveling the United States to expand the business.

By 1910, Walker had become very successful and moved to Indianapolis to establish her headquarters and build a factory, hair salon and beauty school to train sales agents. She died from complications of hypertension at the age of 51.
 

Toledo Area CEO’s and Executive Directors – Women Who Run Things … Big Things!

Cheryl Grice, became CEO of Pathway, Inc at the start of this year, taking over an agency beset by trouble, board strife and the loss of a big chunk of government-funded business. According to board members who unanimously voted to hand over the reins of the operation to its first female CEO, she is perfectly suited to the task.

Grice had sent most or her career on the East Coast before moving to Columbus, OH, 15 years ago. Prior to her appointment as Pathway’s CEO, she was the director of energy efficiency and empowerment services for IMPACT Community Action in Columbus.

Pathway Inc, formerly the Economic Opportunity Planning Association of Greater Toledo (EOPA), has a mission of providing services for low-to-moderate income people. EOPA is one of the agencies founded during the heyday of the President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society years.
 

Recently the agency, which now has a budget of just over $5 million and around 30 employees, lost its decades-long charter to run Head Start in Lucas County. Head Start provided about 75 percent of the agency’s funding during that time.

Now, Grice is squarely focused on workforce development, job training for youth and re-entry programs for ex-offenders. “Through quality programming, we can inspire people to want better things for themselves,” she says.

Grice earned her undergraduate degree in criminal justice from Coppin State University and a master in organizational development and applied behavioral science from Johns Hopkins – both Baltimore, MD institutions.
 

Billie Johnson has worked to improve the quality of life for older adults and their caregivers in northwest Ohio for four decades – since 1974 when she joined what was then known as the Area Office on Aging. The agency had a $200,000 a year budget when she became executive director in 1977.

Now known as the Area Office on Aging of Northwestern Ohio, it is a multi-million dollar non-profit corporation with an annual budget of $45 million, 125 employees and serves clients in Lucas, Wood, Ottawa, Fulton, Sandusky, Erie, Henry, Williams, Defiance and Paulding counties.

Over the years, Johnson has spearheaded the development of housing complexes for low-income clients funded by the U.S. Department f Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The complexes are owned by AOoA.
 

She later developed 43 acres at Arlington and Detroit avenues as a senior services housing complex.

Johnson began her social services career during her student days at the University of Kentucky where she was named associate director of the local YWCA, the youngest administrator in the history of the “Y.”  She moved with her family to Toledo in 1968 and would join AOoA as an analyst. As the agency’s grant writer, she wrote herself a job as planner since she believed they wouldn’t hire her as an administrator.

That seemed to work out pretty well.
 

Sophia Lloyd has been at the helm of the Lucas County Job and Family Services department since June of 2014, returning to Toledo after a 14-year hiatus in Chicago. As the director of the agency, she supervises approximately 400 employees and an annual budget on $40 million – the largest agency under the authority of the Board of Lucas County Commissioners.

Job and Family Services administers a variety of services including temporary cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid and the establishment and enforcement of child support orders.

Lloyd, prior to her present assignment ran the Chicago area Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation – a 50-year-old charitable organization that provides grants to a variety of non-profits.
 

Lloyd has a master’s degree in social work from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s of arts from The University of Toledo. She has more than 20 years of executive leadership experience in community-based organizations focusing on providing social services, housing and administrative oversight.

Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson became the City of Toledo’s chief executive just a few short months ago, following the death of then Mayor D. Michael Collins. As president of Toledo City Council, Hicks-Hudson was, virtue of the City Charter, next in the line of succession.

As such, the new mayor took over an organization with a general fund budget of $248 million. She may not have been entirely ready for such a responsibility, given the unexpected turn of events that catapulted her into office, but she was certainly well prepared.

Hicks-Hudson, a native of Hamilton, OH, earned a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College, a master’s in communications development from Colorado State University and a law degree from the University of Iowa. She arrived in Toledo in 1982 to work for the Toledo Aid Society and thence spent two years as a prosecutor with Lucas County.
 

Among her public service stints are time as a legislative director for Toledo City Council and four years as chief counsel in the State of Ohio Office of Budget and Management. She was appointed to City Council as the District 4 representative in 2011 and won election to the post later in the year. In 2013, her colleagues on City Council elected her as president of that body.

Local CEO’s Who Are Building Big Things in the Central City … Really Big Things! Toledo, as everyone who has walked or driven around the inner city neighborhoods knows, is about as stagnant a mid-sized metropolitan area as can be imagined. Not everyone here, thank goodness, subscribes to the theory that such stagnation is a way of life that must endure.

In recent years four women executives have, taking a leap of faith, invested their organization’s resources in the central city – really the only ones to do so in any substantive manner. It’s an investment that’s going to pay off in a big way for clients and members. They have built, or will be building, residential and commercial structures that will greatly improve the quality of life for thousands of area citizens.

CEO Suzette Cowell opened the Toledo Urban Federal Credit Union 19 years ago – July 1996. The credit union has been housed for those in years in the cramped quarters of a strip mall on Dorr Street even as it has grown to include over 2,100 members and with assets exceeding $5.6 million – and growing in leaps and bounds these days.

This spring, Cowell and TUFCU will break ground for a new 3,500 square-foot facility at the corner of Dorr and Detroit. The million-dollar building will be free standing with its own parking lot and drive-through services – a far cry from the current offerings. And it’s all happening on a street – once housing the lifeblood of the African-American economic community – that has struggled to become once again relevant.

Cowell, a Toledo native who attending both UT and the University of New Hampshire – majoring in banking and community development, has been in banking for the whole of her adult life. She first joined the former First Federal Savings and Loans before moving over to the Toledo Police Credit Union.

Through a campaign of raising fund from a variety of sources, including brick-selling, Cowell has arrived at the point where the future in a new, much larger building is finally within reach.

CEO Lisa McDuffie of the YWCA of Greater Toledo has dedicated her career to empowering and enriching the lives of women and girls. She first started working with the YWCA in 1995.

Named CEO in 2001, McDuffie, a Toledo native who graduated from Rogers High School and earned an undergraduate degree from Findlay College and a masters in social work administration from Case Western Reserve University, made a decision during the worst of times to make her organization’s inner city investment.

In 2009, during the Great Recession when financing was at its most difficult, the YWCA constructed 65 permanent supportive housing units for women and women with children in the form of one and two bedroom apartments. The cost of the building project was just over $10 million and it opened in December 2009.

The structure adjoins the YWCA’s headquarters on Jefferson Street in downtown Toledo.

CEO Doni Miller of Neighborhood Health Association will be breaking ground for her organization’s new building on March 30. The $12 million project on Jefferson Street will bring together the operations of three current sites into one convenient facility – convenient especially for clients. “It’s a pragmatic response to common problems,” says Miller of the decision.

Those problems are old facilities, that don’t respond well to newer technologies and are often not user friendly for clients and patients.

Miller joined NHA as the CEO in March of 1992 when the federally-qualified health agency consisted of one facility. During her tenure, the agency has grown to include 11 facilities servicing 30,000 residents annually most of whom qualify for Medicaid or some other form of entitlement.

A native of Lewisville, Mississippi, Miller as raised in Philadelphia, PA until she was aged 12 when her family relocated to Detroit. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Detroit (now University of Detroit-Mercy) and a law degree from UT.

She began her career in Toledo at United Way and was an assistant hospital administrator at the Medical College Hospitals before joining NHA.

Executive Director Linnie Willis joined the Lucas Metropolitan Housing Authority in 1982 as a housing manager and has since served as director of occupancy, interim executive director, deputy director, director of Human Resources and was appointed to the top position in January 2001.

For years LMHA operated, among other housing projects, two of the oldest such housing units in the nation – Brand Whitlock and Albertus Brown. Both were established almost 75 years ago and encompassed over 400 units. All that has changed.

Under Willis’s guidance, both projects have been razed to make room for a multi-million-dollar three phase construction project.

The first phase – a four-story, 65-unit $10 million facility for seniors on Division Street – has been completed. The second phase is under way. A 68 unit, two and three bedroom, $12 million facility for families broke ground in October of 2014 and will be ready in November 2015.

Phase Three – a 55-unit facility comprised of two and three bedroom townhomes and costing $11.4 million – will be underway in early 2016.

Willis, an Oxford, MS native and graduate of the University of Mississippi, moved to Toledo with her family shortly after earning her degree and got a job with HOPE Inc. After 8 years there, she joined the City of Toledo’s Affirmative Action Office before moving over to LMHA to build things … really big things.

A Celebration of Women’s History Month: Educators Then and Now

Copyright © 2015 by [The Sojourner's Truth]. All rights reserved.
Revised: 08/16/18 14:12:14 -0700.

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