Culture’s Reclaiming Role within Women-Led Social Enterprises
Women-led social enterprises are on the brink of transforming the global economic landscape.
We are witness to national, regional and international collaborations, in addition to strategic and bilateral agreements that carry the potential to synergize and increase the breadth and depth of women’s presence within the world’s economic landscape.
The missing link is that these agreements and collaborations that are meant to support and empower women, have fallen short of their good intentions. They cannot by default help women heal and shift.
At the core of women’s lives are generational imprints of woundedness, pain and shame. Many of our narratives, agreements and beliefs are unheard, untold and unfelt.
What we are being called to look into, are the painful agreements, beliefs and narratives that have entrapped women for centuries.
Women-led social enterprises have a key role to play in addressing the histories of hardship that women have been subject to. They often operate at the grass-roots level where the barriers to women owning their power are omnipresent. The culture of these enterprises is vital in reminding women of their power, to reconcile and reclaim it.
To sum up: Women will have to do their inner works. Women will have to face their triggers. Women will have to sit with their body disconnects. Women will have to strike the balance when it comes to “emotional caring” for the world and start investing in their selves. Women will have to sit with their own matrilineal lineage and allow their selves to slay whatever it is being asked of them. Women will have to walk the path of hate towards other women. Women will have to face one another and question this competitiveness and disconnects that lurk among and within women.
This is no easy path but for any woman who seeks to rise up and for women-led social enterprises that nurture the intent of transforming women’s life - this will be their way to move. Women need safe spaces to allow their selves to churn, brew and face that which emerges everyday. This is no easy thing to do.
The culture of these women-led social enterprises will be pivotal in not only opening economic groundedness to women but most importantly in creating, becoming and holding safe space for women to rise up to their selves. I speak of a language that was common to old lineage of grandmothers within the African Continent and Middle East. None of what I have said is new, our great grandmothers were rooted in the intent of women coming together as healing and shifting to women’s rhythms.
While profit making, feeding the community, impacting the society remain the foremost goals of most women-led social enterprises, starting heart to heart conversations and crafting dynamic organizational structures around “vulnerability, openness, women’s rhythms, beliefs, agreement, connects and disconnects” can lead the way to supporting and guiding women to remember and re-member to own their innate power to create, co-create and collaborate with one another.
The wave of transformation will have to flow from grass-roots, ushering with it our intertwining connectedness and catapulting a heart-centered leadership grounded in vulnerability, openness, sacredness true to women’s rhythms.