WAHINE FREELANCE ALLIANCE
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Mission Statement
Wāhine Freelance Alliance (WFA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides wāhine freelancers with a broad network of resources, education, workforce training, as well as a creative and safe space for them to thrive. Furthermore, WFA aims to increase economic opportunities and development pathways to succeed as freelancers at all stages in their lives. We commit to cultivating the conditions and support for girls and women to obtain workforce training and leverage networks towards economic stability–thereby uplifting and strengthening the entire community and future generations.
About This Cause
Established in March 2021, Wāhine Freelance Alliance’s (WFA) mission is to provide wāhine freelancers with a broad network of resources, education, workforce training, as well as a creative and safe space for them to thrive. Furthermore, WFA aims to increase economic opportunities and self employment pathways for freelancers to succeed at all stages in their lives. We commit to cultivating the conditions and support for girls and women to obtain workforce training and leverage networks towards economic stability–thereby uplifting and strengthening the entire community and future generations. In July 2021, through our fiscal sponsorship with the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement (CNHA), WFA secured a grant from the Women’s Fund of Hawaiʻi (WFH) to develop and execute programming towards the relief, recovery, and reimagining of the economic well-being of girls and women in a post-Covid world. To address the fiscal stability, safety and well-being for Hawaiʻi’s women we created the Wāhine Wordpress and Digital Freelancers Academy (WWDA). The Academy focused on providing workforce training in Wordpress website development , website design, and content creation. In partnership with CNHA and WFH, we successfully recruited and graduated 20 women from the Academy who possessed strong interests in self-employment opportunities that freelancing offers. Participants ranged in ages from 18 to 50+ years old. Furthermore, since the Academy was a virtual program, we had the capacity to support students from Maui, Molokaʻi, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi Island, and Kauaʻi. The funding enabled us to contract four instructors with expertise in website design, wordpress website development, coding, and content creation respectively. In addition to their respective expertise, each Academy instructor came with the freelancing experience necessary to develop and implement courses and content towards leapfrogging the freelance journey for students. Academy highlights and student testimonials can be viewed on our Academy page on our website (https://wahinefreelancealliance.org/academy/). In September 2023, Wāhine Freelance Alliance received its 501(c)3 exemption status from the IRS to further our mission and vision to uplift and strengthen economic opportunities and fiscal stability and well-being for girls and women in Hawaiʻi. WFA’s team possesses the experience and knowledge to help girls and women fully realize their aspirations to become freelancers. Our executive director, Marion Ano, is a freelance website developer and mobile app designer. She has nearly a decade of experience working as a freelancer in Hawaiʻi. Furthermore, she has been teaching website and mobile design and development at UHWO’s Academy of Creative Media for 9 years. Moreover, our board of directors are women with extensive experience in education, teaching, freelancing, entrepreneurship, corporate business operations, business strategy, and product design and development (https://wahinefreelancealliance.org/our-team/). The Problem: Freelancing comes with many drawbacks, including a non-linear pathway which makes it very difficult to start and maintain this economic trajectory. A freelancer’s professional network combined with her level of expertise can be the two most important factors that determines her staying power as a freelancer. Freelancers become experts in their field by investing countless hours of learning, working, building, creating, and developing their skill sets. Faced with a steep learning curve and lack of time and resources needed to become and remain a seasoned freelancer, simply said this trajectory remains an unattainable self-employment pathway for many women without a supportive professional network. Furthermore, the mentorship and time to learn and develop digital freelancer skill sets may not be equally available to all women. Therefore, although desirable, freelance opportunities to secure fiscal stability remain available to individuals who belong to the upper to middle-class workforce. WFA believes that we can help break these economic and workforce barriers for girls and women through building a professional community that will enable them to thrive. The Reality & Needs: In Hawaiʻi, the “gig economy” in the arts is one of the fastest growing job sectors. Preparing girls and women for these emergent freelance opportunities means that they will be well versed in the practices and business acumen required to succeed. However, freelancer training and educational opportunities in various industries including but not limited to web design and development, graphic design, user experience, content creation, coding, marketing, copyediting, copywriting, blogging and entrepreneurship may not be available in some traditional educational institutions. More than likely, freelancers acquire their skills and expertise through real world projects, work experiences, and collaborations working for paying clients. Furthermore, freelancers who have robust professional networks will perform better at securing clients over and over again which in turn exponentially increases their level of expertise. As a determinant for economic success, it is imperative that freelancers have the opportunity to connect with others and build robust and meaningful professional networks that includes diverse individuals from business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, freelancers, and fellow creatives. The number of individuals in a freelancer’s professional network cannot be overstated as it directly correlates to how much income an individual will generate. Although freelancers benefit from the flexibility of remote work, they are not immune to the loneliness and isolation that come with this type of work. These drawbacks of remote work can decrease mental health outcomes which in turn can negatively impact work performance and the capacity to overcome client related issues and the technical challenges that come with freelancing. Without the help and support of co-workers and managers available in traditional work settings, freelancer success rates can vary. In some cases, individuals may succumb to setbacks of solo work and their desire to become seasoned freelancers becomes unattainable. Our Opportunity: And yet despite the odds and challenges facing wāhine freelancers, many of them are finding tremendous success in this nontraditional career pathway. Serving as trailblazers in Hawai’iʻs freelancing industry, these wāhine are rewriting the future of work especially for girls and women. Our wāhine freelancers are scaling up and securing larger contracts through collaborations with other freelancers and women in business. And through this co-creative process, their skills increase exponentially and their professional networks grow. Freelancers who are mothers, are creating systems and sharing innovative ideas to better strike a work-life balance while also protecting their career growth and trajectory through freelancing. Freelancing can also ease the negative impacts to a woman’s financial stability and well-being caused by an unexpected layoff, an unfortunate personal event, a future pandemic or natural disaster. We know the desire to freelance exists in Hawaiʻi. Despite receiving over 50 applications for the Academy in 2021, we could only accept 20 women to maintain the quality of our programming. The Academy demonstrated that Hawaiʻi’s women are eager to establish economic well-being and fiscal stability through gaining the skill sets to launch into digital freelancing. We also learned that the benefits of freelancing which include work-life balance, access to diverse projects, flexibility, remote work, family friendly fiscal stability, and higher pay are top of mind for women in Hawaiʻi. They want to shape the future of work under the terms and conditions that support them to thrive and uplift one another. WFA is at the forefront of this movement to support the emergence of a more inclusive, diverse, and women-centered economy. With this momentum in place, WFA sees an opportunity to build, launch, and pilot a virtual headquarters, a metaverse for wāhine productivity and innovation, for 50 wāhine freelancers, founders, and entrepreneurs. We see this as the first and necessary step towards securing a more stable economic future for wāhine by wāhine. The WFA Headquarters (WFA HQ) will become the virtual office for wāhine from across the Islands that is multi-generational, multi-disciplinary, and composed of individuals with diverse work experiences and backgrounds. Mirroring a traditional in-person office, our WFA HQ will be a space where women can connect, collaborate, and create together. We believe that the WFA HQ will increase the determinants of economic success for wāhine through increasing the number of individuals in each member’s network and providing women access to workforce training sessions and professional development workshops. As a direct result of WFA HQ, we expect to see an increase in the economic well-being and fiscal stability for our members. Furthermore, WFA HQ will enable members to support and learn from each other and level up their expertise. WFA HQ will provide 1:1 weekly office hours with experts offering mentorship and solutions for our membership and broader WFA community in various disciplines including but not limited to website design, website development, marketing, artificial intelligence (AI), graphic design, and user experience and interface design (https://wahinefreelancealliance.org/headquarters/).