We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Wanda Walborn a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Wanda, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear you experience with and lessons learned from recruiting and team building.
I was asked to create a program for women, so I put immediately invited a diverse team of 12 women to join me in the process. The team’s diversity in age, ethnicity, educational background, philosophy of ministry and experience brought rich discussion about how to create a developmental program that would benefit all women in whatever stage of life they were in. Our team met and worked for a year to come up with a developmental program that would best serve a variety of women from the stay-at-home mother to the corporate vice president. We’ve been in existence since 2012. If I were to start again today, I would again go after a wide range of people to work with me.
Wanda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I have been an educator for 38 years and love to teach experientially. My field is spiritual formation which means that I believe God wants to have relationship with people so we can learn to hear His voice and have a close relationship with Him. Fear, shame, insecurity, anxiety, and lies we believe prevent us from daring to come near to God, so we stay at a distance and hope our good deeds will be enough for Him. We don’t realize that He is Love and that nothing can ever separate us from Him.
Our program helps women understand their identity in Christ, identify their spiritual gifts and figure out where in the world to use those gifts whether at home, the workplace, community or church. Women first need to get free themselves, so they can then lead others to freedom.
Our mentoring groups are a place to talk through what God is doing in our lives and receive support and prayer to do what God is showing us to do. We invite and offer. We invite women to listen to God, then offer to support her as she begins or stops behavior God is pointing out to her.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
The most effective strategy for growing our clientele has been the transformation of women’s lives. Women who used to be insecure and fearful are now starting their own foundations, businesses, ministries and stepping into greater places of leadership where their husbands and pastors keep asking us what we are teaching them because they are different women from when they started the program.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Starting Empower itself was a pivot. My role as Director of Spiritual Formation at a Christian College in Nyack, New York and adjunct teaching was my full-time job. The invitation to start this certificate program for women was due to a pastor’s wife who took her own life. Our denominational district leadership was devastated that a woman in leadership was so distraught and lonely that this was her only recourse. Our seminary asked me to create a program for women, so after assembling the diverse team and meeting for one year, we launched the program and ran it with volunteers. With sites around the world, a given Saturday could have up to 500 women leading and mentoring other women to draw closer to God.
This past April, 2024, served as our one year anniversary as a 501c3 nonprofit ministry. Up to that point, we served as a ministry under our denominational district. May of 2024 we completed our first virtual- only sessions to be more scalable, accessible, and sustainable. We have two other advance classes we added and this past March offered our inaugural, one-day women’s conference with over 630 women in attendance.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.empowerww.org
