My job isn’t to teach them skills, it’s to believe in their potential so fiercely that eventually they borrow that belief and make it their own.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Sarah Quinn.
Sarah Quinn is the founder of She Thrives Global, a nonprofit that provides free business training, mentorship, and job placement services to women in developing countries. Based in Canada, she launched She Thrives in November 2024 after seeing talented women complete training but have nowhere to apply their skills. Today, She Thrives has developed 64 foundational courses and built a community of over 10,000 women, with goals to reach 20,000 women across 30 nations by 2026. Quinn also founded the She Thrives VA Marketplace, creating a direct pipeline from education to employment for the women she trains.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Honestly? I’ve been there. I know what it feels like to lie awake at night wondering how you’re going to provide for yourself, for your family. That kind of struggle stays with you.
And at some point I realized, this isn’t just my story. This is a global challenge. There are millions of women around the world who are capable, who are smart, who would do anything for their families, but they just don’t have access to the education or opportunities they need.
As a mom, that hit me differently. I thought, if I have the skills and the ideas to actually change this for other women, then maybe that’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. So I went all in. She Thrives became my mission, not just my work.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
One thing I hear a lot from women in our community is: ‘I’ve tried to get a job online, but I just keep getting hired and fired.’ And that stuck with me because these women aren’t lacking motivation. They’re not lazy. They just haven’t developed the skills or guidance to actually succeed in remote work.
So when one of our members told me she’d been through that cycle over and over, and then after going through our training, she’d been working with the same client for months? That was everything.
That’s the whole mission right there. We’re not just teaching women how to get a job, we’re teaching them how to keep one. How to build something stable. And for a woman supporting her family, that stability is life-changing.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I don’t know if I have a funny mistake, but my early mistakes felt pretty serious at the time.
My biggest early mistake was assuming that access was the only barrier. I think we have such a scarcity mindset around money as people. I just assumed if you offer someone a path to income, of course they’ll take it. Why wouldn’t they?
But then we started getting pushback. And it wasn’t from the economy or the technology, it was from the women themselves. They were hesitant to participate. I had to step back and ask: what’s really going on here?
What I didn’t fully understand was how differently each country, each culture, views women working. In some places, a woman earning money is celebrated. In others, it’s threatening, to husbands, to families, to community dynamics. We weren’t just fighting poverty. We were up against generations of messaging that told these women they shouldn’t work, or couldn’t, or that it wasn’t their place.
The barrier wasn’t access…It was belief.
So our whole approach shifted. We couldn’t just hand women skills and opportunities. We had to help them feel like they were allowed to want more. Empowerment became just as important as education. That’s why She Thrives isn’t just a training program, it’s about the whole person. And honestly, that lesson changed how we design everything.
Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?
We’re attacking poverty at its root, by giving women the skills, confidence, and opportunities to earn their own income.
We’ve now reached over 10,000 women with more than 900 recorded training sessions. And everything is 100% free. That’s non-negotiable. Because the women who need this most can’t afford a course fee or a subscription. We’ve designed our training to work on a smartphone with limited internet, in 20-minute lessons that fit around family responsibilities. We meet women where they actually are not where we wish they were.
But here’s what makes She Thrives different: we don’t stop at training. We just launched our own job platform, The VA Marketplace. Where women can actually get discovered and hired by entrepreneurs who need their skills. We’re closing the gap between education and income. Because training without opportunity is just information. We’re building the whole pipeline.
And the impact ripples out. When a woman earns, she feeds her children, sends them to school, reinvests in her community. We’re not just changing one life,we’re shifting the trajectory of entire households and communities.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
There’s a woman named Ritchell in the Philippines. She came to She Thrives looking for a way to earn income, and we were able to help her land a job as a virtual assistant.
But then a typhoon hit her area. Her roof was destroyed. And here’s what happened next, without anyone asking them to, the women in our community came together and raised money to buy her a new roof.
That moment showed me what we’re really building. Yes, we teach skills. Yes, we help women get jobs. But what’s underneath all of that is a community of women who show up for each other. Ritchell didn’t just gain income, she gained a global network of sisters who had her back when everything fell apart.
That’s the impact that doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet. But it’s the reason this work matters.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
The first thing is a mindset shift. I hear this a lot: ‘Why help people overseas when there are problems in our own backyard?’ And I understand that instinct. But here’s the reality: when communities in developing countries don’t have money circulating within them, they rely on outside aid, often from the very countries saying ‘help your own first.’ It’s a cycle. But when women can earn income, they spend locally, send their kids to school, and start businesses. The economy strengthens from the inside. That community eventually needs less outside help, not more. So empowering women globally isn’t instead of helping locally, it’s how we break the cycle of dependency altogether.
Second: hire them. If you’re an entrepreneur who needs help in your business, consider hiring a trained woman from a developing country. Platforms like our VA Marketplace exist for exactly this reason. You get quality work. She gets a dignified income. It’s not charity…it’s a fair exchange that changes lives.
Third, for politicians and institutions: invest in infrastructure. The biggest barriers these women face are unreliable internet and limited access to banking. You can train a woman and connect her to a job, but if she can’t get paid or stay online, none of it matters. That’s where policy can move mountains.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
Leadership is holding the belief for someone when they can’t hold it for themselves yet. Most of the women I work with have been told their whole lives they can’t, they shouldn’t, it’s not their place. My job isn’t to teach them skills, it’s to believe in their potential so fiercely that eventually they borrow that belief and make it their own.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
1. The problem you think you’re solving isn’t the real problem
When I started She Thrives, I thought the problem was access. Give women training and opportunity, and they’ll run with it. Simple. But then we started getting pushback, not from the economy, not from technology, from the women themselves. They were hesitant to participate. I had to step back and realize we weren’t just fighting poverty. We were up against generations of messaging telling these women they shouldn’t work, couldn’t work, that it wasn’t their place. The barrier wasn’t access. It was belief. Once I understood that, everything about how we designed our programs changed.
2. Small is the strategy — not a stepping stone
Everyone in the startup and nonprofit world talks about scale. Go big. Impact millions. But I’ve learned that small is the strategy. A woman earning $25 a month might not sound revolutionary. But for a family in a developing country, that’s food on the table. That’s a child staying in school. That’s dignity. We’re not building toward big wins someday, we’re stacking small wins that change everything right now. I wish someone had told me earlier that you don’t need massive numbers to have massive impact. Small, consistent gains create lasting change.
3. Your struggle is your credibility
I spent a long time thinking I needed more credentials, more experience, more something before I could do this work. But here’s what actually connects me to the women I serve: I’ve been there. I know what it feels like to lie awake wondering how you’re going to provide for yourself, for your family. That’s not a weakness in my story, it’s my authority. The women trust me because I’m not talking to them from some ivory tower. I’ve felt what they’re feeling. If you’ve struggled, don’t hide it. Lead with it.
4. Community will outperform your best strategy
There’s a woman in our program named Ritchell in the Philippines. We helped her get a job as a virtual assistant. Then a typhoon hit and destroyed her roof. I didn’t organize a fundraiser. I didn’t send out an appeal. The women in our community just did it, they came together and raised money to buy her a new roof. No one asked them to. That moment taught me that the most powerful thing you can build isn’t a program or a platform. It’s a community that shows up for each other. You can’t strategize that into existence. You just have to create the conditions for it and get out of the way.
5. The gap between training and income is where dreams die
I kept hearing the same thing from women in our community: “I’ve tried to get a job online, but I keep getting hired and fired.” They weren’t lacking motivation. They had the training. But there was nowhere for them to actually apply it with support. That’s why we built the VA Marketplace, a platform where trained women can get discovered and hired by entrepreneurs who need their skills. Training without opportunity is just information. If you want to actually change lives, you have to close the gap between learning and earning. That’s where dreams either take off or die quietly. I wish someone had told me to think about the full pipeline from day one.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite quote is from Maya Angelou: ‘You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.’
When I started She Thrives, I had no funding, no team, no roadmap. Just a mission and a lot of problems to solve. I had to get creative, designing training for women who often have access, language and cultural barriers, building a job platform with zero budget, figuring out how to empower women across dozens of different cultures.
There were moments I thought I was tapped out. But what I discovered is that creativity works like a muscle, not a tank. The more problems I solved, the more solutions I could see. The more I gave, the more I had.
And honestly, that’s what I see in the women we serve too. Their potential isn’t a limited resource. When you give them a chance to use it, it multiplies.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Elon Musk. And not for the reason most people might think.
I’m not looking for a donation or a handout. I’m building something I think he’d actually find interesting, a self-sustaining model that creates economic independence without ongoing aid dependency.
She Thrives trains women in developing countries for free, then connects them to real jobs through our own marketplace. We take 5% which covers our operating costs instead of Fiverr’s 20%. No bureaucracy. No charity mindset. Just skilled women earning income that transforms their families and communities.
Elon has talked about the importance of economic stability, sustainable population growth, and systems that actually solve problems instead of just managing them. That’s exactly what we’re building.
I’d love 30 minutes to talk about what sustainable global impact actually looks like, not charity, but opportunity. And knowing how his mind works, he’d probably leave me with ten ideas I hadn’t thought of.
So if you’re reading this, Elon…breakfast is on me. Though fair warning, I’ll probably spend the whole time pitching you on why this model could scale globally.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
The “Hire Her” Movement A global shift in how businesses think about outsourcing.
I’d start a movement called ‘Hire Her.’ What if every entrepreneur, every small business owner, every company that outsources work made one simple commitment: hire at least one trained woman from a developing country?
Not as charity. As a business decision. Because these women are talented, motivated, and ready to work. And every hire creates a ripple, she feeds her family, sends her kids to school, reinvests in her community.
Imagine if hiring globally and ethically became as normal as buying fair trade coffee. That’s the movement I want to see.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Readers can follow all of our progress on our Facebook page She Thrives Global.
Thank you so much for the time. This was very meaningful, we wish you only continued success in your great work!
Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Sarah Quinn Of She Thrives Global Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.