I was a senior at a small, all-girls boarding school in Middlebury, Connecticut, when I first met Markey Culver, the founder, and CEO of The Women’s Bakery, Inc. At Westover, the girls you meet there are girls you are bonded with for life, with our signature motto, “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, and the other is gold”. I never quite realized how intimate that setting was, or how much it mimicked the small community that is the entrepreneurial world. It was there, sitting in my financial literacy class, that she spoke to us on Zoom, before coming to class virtually would become a thing of the norm. A few years and a pandemic later, we met again, realizing we now share two schools in common.

During her time in the Peace Corps, Markey saw women in Bushoga, a village in Rwanda, working to provide for themselves and their families. There, while teaching the women to prepare their own bread, is where she came up with the idea that would change not only her own life but also the lives of many others. 

In my spring semester of freshman year, in my Endgame of Entrepreneurship class, I learned that being a true entrepreneur is about solving a problem for someone else. And that is exactly what Markey has done with The Women’s Bakery. In providing a group of women with one recipe and the managerial skills to run something as new to them as a small business and creating The Women’s Bakery, she has allowed for the women working there to financially support themselves, have better access to medical care, as well as access to schooling for their children. And with three bakery locations, one in Kigali, the country’s capital, Gicumbi, Ruyenzi, as well as a school feeding program called the One Bread Project providing a daily snack for primary aged children, her strides continue to change the way we look at the meaning of sustainable business. Having the bakeries source locally in Rwanda also allows for the bakery to strengthen the economy, not just for the women, but especially nearby farmers. 

In fact, in a 2017 Tedx talk Markey shared, “Our bakeries create access to sustainable gainful employment for women. Every single woman working at one of our bakeries has doubled her pre-bakery income…these women are earning money, their children are healthier, their communities are stronger, and the skills that they have earned can never be taken away”. With a small team of 60 members, The Women’s Bakery is a global vision. 

In 2018, the Skandalaris Center awarded Markey and The Women’s Bakery with the Global Impact Award. The Global Impact Award was founded in 2013 to support the vision and passion of Washington University in St. Louis students, postdoctoral researchers, and recent alumni who are creating ventures that are scalable, sustainable, and quick-to-market with proof of concept and a broad impact. 

“By the time that we won the Global Impact Award, I think it was my third time applying; and I failed every single time. And then in 2018, we got it and the reason that we got it was because there was a clarity of vision, there was a clarity of mission, there was a proof concept and The Women’s Bakery was working, and people saw that it was working and believed in that and then invested” said founder, Markey.

The judges of the Global Impact Award, in having the choice to award multiple different ventures, decided to give the award and the full $50,000 prize money all to The Women’s Bakery. To which the CEO expressed her gratitude and found the award validating all the progress that was being made. The significance of such a prestigious award from an institution like WashU gave the supporters of The Women’s Bakery confidence in their longevity. 

“It gave the team confidence that what they were doing was working and that they would still have job security. None of the bakeries are profitable yet, which means that we are subsidizing on the operation, so without being able to raise money those women wouldn’t get paid. The concept of a non-profit when you’re running a for-profit business can sometimes be difficult. I think that it felt really validating for the team that we were on the right track and we were attracting the types of investment that would have a long-term return. When you’re building a business, whether it is for-profit or non-profit, you need a lot of capital because you’re going to make a lot of mistakes and most of those mistakes will cost you money”(Culver).

As Markey continues to work with her team throughout the pandemic to keep the bakeries and the company running as smoothly as possible in the new year, they are developing strategies for a successful 2022. The goals for The Women’s Bakery include profitability of the bakeries and bakery expansion, purchasing more locations, and providing the kitchens with efficient equipment. She and her team hope by the beginning of 2023 to have built and opened a new bakery in partnership with Partners in Health, a non-profit healthcare organization, with the goal of feeding between 6 to 8 thousand children a day.

At the end of our interview, I asked Markey what message she wanted to give to students in Skandalaris, to which she replied, “Failure will happen, but when it does you have an opportunity to learn and stand up and keep going. For me, The Women’s Bakery was a concept I could not stop thinking about and it didn’t matter what way I looked at it, it still would work and I would try and talk myself out of it all the time, and I couldn’t. If you have an idea, and you genuinely, deeply believe in it, and you fail, get back up”. She also sent a call out to all the women entrepreneurs in hiding, “Where are you? we need you!”.

For more updates on Markey and her team at The Women’s Bakery, go www.womensbakery.com/home, or follow @womensbakery on Instagram!