The Road to Wealth Building: Women, Entrepreneurship, and the Power of Community
- Feb 11
- 3 min read
By Corinne Goble
CEO of the Association of Women’s Business Centers (AWBC)
I grew up in a humble home in an active floodplain on the Grand River. Most winters brought ice jams, which meant flooding in the spring; it was never a question of if it would flood, but how high the water would rise. As meager as that life was, my parents were proud to own their home. By the time I was in kindergarten, my mother had left her factory job to drive an old cargo van for the trucking company she would eventually build into a multi-million-dollar enterprise.
Through her, I learned early that wealth building wouldn’t come from working for someone else. It came from ownership, persistence, and time. The phones in our home rang at all hours with requests to move freight and questions from drivers coordinating pickups and deliveries. From the dispatch desk, she taught me how to manage the moving parts of a small business while seizing opportunities for growth. That lesson shaped my understanding of entrepreneurship long before I had a word for it.
Today, as women’s economic influence reshapes the modern Sheconomy, those lessons feel even more urgent. Women continue to face persistent wealth gaps driven by pay inequity, caregiving responsibilities, limited access to capital, and the undervaluing of women’s labor. Yet entrepreneurship remains one of the strongest vehicles for women to build wealth on their own terms. When women start and grow businesses, they generate not only income, but assets, autonomy, and long-term financial security.
Closing the wealth gap, however, requires more than encouraging women to launch businesses. It means ensuring they have the support to scale. Too often, women entrepreneurs are boxed into microbusinesses with microcapital—the economic equivalent of being stuck on the shoulder of the highway. With access to meaningful financing, mentorship, networks, and digital tools, women can shift lanes—moving from survival to growth, self-employment to employer status, and instability to lasting wealth.
Financial independence in today’s Sheconomy is not defined by checking account balances alone. It is the ability to make choices based on values rather than vulnerability. It looks like women owning equity, property, intellectual assets, and enterprises.
It looks like business models designed for resilience and well-being. Most importantly, it looks like agency—the power to determine one’s own path forward.
No one builds wealth in isolation. My mother’s company survived because of the community she found: women who owned successful businesses, shared operational wisdom, referred work to one another, and offered encouragement when the road became difficult. Her experience taught me that financial empowerment accelerates when it is rooted in community economics, where resources circulate locally and women invest in each other’s success.
Across the country, women-focused entrepreneurial organizations are proving the transformative power of this approach. They help entrepreneurs access capital, navigate regulations, adopt technology, and strengthen business foundations. In rural communities, women collaborate to create shared markets and cooperative services. In cities, they build enterprises that meet essential neighborhood needs. These networks expand not just individual wealth, but collective opportunity.
In my work designing standards and certification systems for women-focused entrepreneurial development organizations, I carry my mother’s legacy with me. Her dispatching company may have been modest, but its impact was generational. It showed me that the road to wealth building is shaped by clarity, persistence, and a willingness to navigate complexity.
The future of women’s economic power will be authored by those who chart their own routes—entrepreneurs who refuse to wait for permission, communities that lift one another up, and ecosystems designed to help women accelerate rather than stall. When more women own their road, the entire economy moves forward.
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