Many of you may have seen the announcement that co-publisher/co-founder Vanessa Freytag will be the first executive director for the Women’s Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. The decision to pursue a fulltime role advocating for women and girls is the culmination of a long and wonderful journey.

Author Robert Bella captures the essence of this journey:

“First there’s the job – where the goal is simply to earn a living and support your family. There there’s the career where you trace your progress through various appointments and achievements. Finally there’s the calling – the ideal blend of activity and character that makes work inseparable from life.”

I realized after many months of contemplation and journaling that throughout my career I have wrapped my passion for women’s issues into my work but it hasn’t been wholly fulfilling. The difficulty in integrating advocacy into a job is that at the end of the day your primary purpose is to help the business be a success – banking, consulting or producing a newspaper. The Women’s Fund role allows me to make advocacy the business.

Admittedly, Women & Business came closest to fully merging the passion and the business but in the end it only provided the ability to indirectly affect women and girls. As executive director of the Women’s Fund I can now have direct impact on the critical factors to reach the Fund’s mission: “To transform the lives of women and girls in Greater Cincinnati through fund raising, grant making, research and advocacy to make our community a national leader in creating opportunities for women and girls.”

I am always amazed at the vast resources in our community – the universities, the arts, the corporate base, the history. We are a leader in so many arenas but we continue to lag behind in almost every measure of women and girls’ health and well-being. The original PULSE study released by the Women’s Fund in 2005 ignited in me a passion to help our community step up to its potential. That passion has led me to commit myself completely to that pursuit.

“The start to a better world is our belief that it is possible.” Katherine Shaw.

A note on the future of Women & Business: The purpose of the paper’s summer hiatus is to find the right collaboration or partnership that can take Women & Business to next level. We recognized that Women & Business can continue to be a strong voice for businesswomen and plays an important role in highlighting the success of professional women in this region. We are talking with several different entities about a new structure and we hope to have an update in the coming months.

Until then keep checking our website throughout the summer for new content including the Top 10 Women in Marketing & Advertising. You can still contact us with editorial ideas or ideas for the next phase of the paper at vanessaf@womensbusinesscincinnati.com or debbied@womensbusinesscincinnati.com.

Vanessa Freytag, Women & Business