Apollo was mentioned in the LBC trainings and it’s a bit out of my budget at the moment. Are there other platforms that would be a good idea to use? I also use social media like Instagram for majority of my creative contracts with NPOs and CBOs and which just wondering if there was any recommendations for that.

I’m watching the Trump administration tell nurses they’re not “professional” anymore. And all I can think about is Mary Eliza Mahoney. Not a policymaker. Not a lobbyist. A Black woman born in 1845 who decided she was a professional long before the government had language for it. Her story didn’t start with a white coat. She got a job at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Not as “Nurse Mahoney.” As a janitor. A cook. A washerwoman. A nurse’s aide. For more than 15 years, she worked behind the scenes of a system that did not see her as equal. Most people would’ve called it “entry level.” Mary treated it like a paid residency. She watched how the hospital ran. She studied patient care. She learned the rhythms of birth, illness, and recovery from every angle. Then she made a move. She applied to the hospital’s 16-month nursing program. Dozens started. Only a small group finished. Mary Eliza Mahoney graduated in 1879. She became the first Black woman in the United States to complete formal nurse training and earn a professional nursing license. No shortcuts. No “influencer” title. Just work, rigor, and standards. And after all that? Public hospitals still didn’t want her as an equal. So she made another decision: She focused on private-duty nursing. She built a premium practice serving mostly white, wealthy families. She became known for efficiency, discretion, and extraordinary bedside manner. Families requested her by name. No algorithm pushed her content. Her name was the algorithm. And she still didn’t stop with herself. In 1908, she helped co-found the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. She took private success and turned it into public infrastructure. Now put that next to 2026. Nursing gets moved off the “professional degree” list. Loan caps tighten. Graduate programs get harder to afford. A woman-dominated field—especially filled by women of color—gets quietly downgraded on paper. They say, “It’s not a value judgment.”

They’re comfortable telling you Harriet Tubman freed people. They’re not comfortable telling you she also bought land, built assets, and ran operations that would put many modern founders to shame. Her genius extended far beyond the version they hand you in school. Between rescue missions, Harriet was quietly acquiring property in Auburn, New York — first about seven acres for roughly 1,200 dollars in 1859 Then roughly 25 more acres at auction in 1896 while living on a 20-dollar monthly pension. Add it up and she controlled over 30 acres, plus buildings, in an era when most Black women couldn’t legally vote, let alone hold land at that scale. Here’s what almost no one tells you about her: ✔️ Harriet negotiated her labor even while enslaved. At one point, she struck a deal with her enslaver to “hire herself out” — paying a fixed amount for her time so she could keep what she earned above that, effectively creating a primitive profit-share inside bondage. ✔️ She used her wartime skills like a revenue engine. During the Civil War, she served as a scout, nurse, and spy for the Union — including helping lead the Combahee River Raid that freed more than 700 enslaved people in a single night — and then spent years fighting for the pension and pay she was owed. ✔️ She turned her home into a mini ecosystem. After the war, she ran a boarding house, took in elders and formerly enslaved people, sold goods (including home-brewed drinks and food), spoke publicly, and later founded the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged on her land — converting property into long-term, mission-aligned infrastructure. That’s not just courage. That’s operations, negotiation, and asset strategy. Here’s what they don’t teach you about building a network: it’s not about connections. It’s about trust. Harriet built a network where the people she personally led weren’t lost, under a bounty, across multiple states — and then leveraged that same trust to build income streams and assets in freedom.

Before corporate diversity panels. Before “Black girl magic” was a hashtag. Fannie Barrier Williams was getting paid to stand on one of the biggest stages in the world in 1893… and then using that clout to force her way into white women’s power rooms that were never built for her. Fannie wasn’t just “an activist.” She was one of the first Black women in her town to earn a formal teaching credential — a Brockport State Normal School education most Black women were locked out of. She treated that degree like currency, not decor. When she moved to Chicago, she didn’t wait for someone to “discover” her. She wrote. She published. She lectured. Her essays ran in Black and white newspapers. Her talks in churches and women’s clubs came with honorariums. She turned intellect into invoices while the culture painted Black women as uneducated and immoral. By the time the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women needed speakers, she wasn’t a token. She was the first Black woman on that main platform, telling thousands of white women that their vaunted “protection” never seemed to cover women with her complexion — and documenting the intellectual progress of Black women since emancipation in real time. Most people would’ve stopped there. She didn’t. She took that visibility and went straight at one of Chicago’s most powerful white women’s clubs — the Chicago Woman’s Club. This was the group pushing juvenile court laws, compulsory education, and funding hospitals and schools. On paper, it wasn’t “whites only.” In reality, every member was white. When her name was nominated, some members threatened to quit. They voted her down. The fight hit the papers. She kept pressing. Fourteen months later, they voted again — and let her in as the first Black member. That wasn’t symbolism. That was strategy. Because now the Black woman they didn’t want to sit with was in the room while they decided: Who got funded. Which children got schools. Whose stories were worth saving.

Is there a SYWTC article or video about how to create a waitlist for a program? Thank you for your help, fellow community members. 🙂