When Systems Break, Women Build Networks

In 2017, The Period Purse founder Jana Girdauskas asked her local Facebook group for a spare purse so she could keep period products in her car for the next time she met someone in need. The idea came from a simple question she couldn’t shake after talking with someone experiencing homelessness. How do you manage your period when you don’t have reliable access to products, privacy, or a safe place to go?

Her post sparked a groundswell. Within weeks, 350 purses filled with supplies showed up. An unofficial women-led network had taken root.

It’s a small story with a big takeaway. When systems leave gaps, women-led networks organize relationships into action. Whether they’re sharing resources, protecting community safety, coordinating services, or expanding opportunity, they show up everywhere from neighborhood circles to international campaigns.

The Period Purse: Mutual aid that scales into infrastructure

According to the Government of Canada, 17% of people in Canada who menstruate have experienced period poverty, meaning they couldn’t afford or access the products they needed. That number jumps to 1 in 4 among people living in lower-income households. 

The Period Purse responds to this reality by distributing thousands of period products each month, offering education to reduce stigma, and advocating for long-term policy change.

For Jacqueline, a resident of one of Toronto’s shelters, a purse meant more than products. “My first reaction when I received one of your purses from the shelter I was staying at was that I felt special,” she told the organization. The card tucked inside, handwritten and personal, was its own kind of relief. “I felt like I was being addressed personally as opposed to a generic group of homeless women.”

In testimony to Canada’s House of Commons, the organization reported donating nearly 4.8 million period products through its outreach program, alongside ongoing menstrual education efforts.

The Period Purse shows how women-led networks can turn care into coordinated access at scale.

Sudan: Women organizing amid escalating gender-based violence

In Sudan, those same instincts toward coordination have become a matter of survival. Since fighting erupted in April 2023, triggering mass displacement and a protection emergency that has hit women and girls especially hard. As formal systems and humanitarian access struggled, women-led networks stepped in to coordinate safety, share information, and protect the most vulnerable.

In Kassala, that meant women on opposite sides of the conflict learning to work side by side. Amani, one of the women who took part, fled Kadugli in South Kordofan when fighting closed in on her city. She joined a petty trade initiative with 25 other women, some displaced like her, some from the host community, selling sugar, flour, and cooking oil out of a shared stall. The business started as a way to survive. It became something else.

“We used to look at each other as strangers,” Amani said in a UNDP Sudan/Peacebuilding Fund report. “But through this project, we became partners. Now, we share not just goods, but goals and respect.”

Gisma, another participant from Kassala, described a similar shift. “I used to worry about the future, about division,” she said. “But this project gave me hope. We now have a reason to work together, to support each other. It has changed how we see ourselves — not just as tribes, but as women with a common purpose.”

The same pattern appears at a larger scale. Researcher Wala Bashari’s report on women-led networks in Sudan’s urban crisis response documents volunteer “emergency rooms” in Kassala that organized evacuations for children and people with disabilities, including one operation that moved 570 children out of an orphanage to safety. Bashari also describes “Together Against Rape,” a virtual campaign launched in December 2023 that documented incidents of gender-based violence and coordinated medical, psychological, and legal support, monitoring 245 cases by drawing on a network of doctors, lawyers, and aid workers.

Those efforts feed into something larger still. The Peace for Sudan Platform now connects more than 49 women-led organizations across the country. “We are paving the way for a women-led transformation in Sudan’s political and social landscape,” says Israa Dawood, a member of the platform, which has pushed for 50 percent representation of women in peace talks and helped shape a 2024 declaration now informing regional and international negotiations.

Women’s Earth Alliance: Climate solutions built through women-led networks

Climate change creates a different kind of emergency. It moves slower than a war, but in many communities it creates the same reality: disruption, displacement, and the need for local systems people can actually rely on.

Rebecca Jim watched that emergency arrive one morning in 1979. She was a school counselor in Miami, Oklahoma, a town built on top of a played-out lead and zinc mine. The creek she passed on her way to work turned orange overnight, the abandoned mineshafts beneath it finally filling and overflowing with toxic runoff. Jim spent years pressing government agencies to act. When a local landowner asked, at yet another meeting with officials, who was actually in charge of cleaning it up, Jim knocked on his door the next day.

“I told him, ‘We’ll be the lead agency,'” she says. In 1997, she made it official, co-founding LEAD Agency, an Indigenous-led nonprofit still fighting to restore Tar Creek today.

Jim is now a leader with Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), one of thousands the organization has trained through its Accelerator model, which pairs grassroots leaders with strategy support, training, and connection to a broader network so they can scale solutions already rooted in their communities. WEA’s 2024 Impact Report counted 6,812 women and girls trained in environmental solutions across 13 countries that year alone, reaching more than 665,000 people with practical climate response.

Athena Collective: A modern network built for women in business

Professional life has its own system failures. Access often depends on relationships, and relationships depend on whether people feel safe enough to ask for help, believe they belong, and know where to turn when things get hard.

For Athena Collective, a women-led network works when it creates psychological safety and trust first. Without that foundation, growth stays surface-level. Trust and belonging come first. Everything else follows.

That foundation is what makes the network’s reach possible. Athena Collective is an inclusive, omni-channel community designed to meet women where they are. The network provides an invaluable service to founders and their businesses, but its reach wouldn’t be the same without a network of allies — vendors, sponsors, community partners, and others who don’t have to be women themselves. When Sarah Bundy, the Co-Founder and CEO of Athena Collective, was asked about collaborating with allies, she said, “Collaboration is stronger than competition. Value exchange is real. And when done right, rising tides truly do lift all boats.”

A Blueprint for Shared Power

Despite operating in completely different contexts, these networks share the same architecture: they refuse to wait for permission. They create access where systems leave gaps, share information quickly, and keep people moving forward when the path gets uncertain.

They also prove that organized support can take many forms, from infrastructure and food on a table to products in someone’s hands, protection in a crisis, a restored ecosystem, or a leader who keeps going instead of burning out alone.

Allies have a real role in this work. They can uplift these communities by funding what’s already working, sharing access, and making introductions. They can offer expertise while practicing shared leadership. They can show up consistently, and step back when it’s time for women to lead. When collaboration is treated as a practice instead of a slogan, these networks can scale their impact without losing their values.

Women-led networks remind us that resilience doesn’t begin with institutions. It begins with people who decide to show up for one another.

HOW YOU CAN CREATE IMPACT:

Listen to Ellevate Network’s Conversations With Women Changing the Face of Business. After an episode, pick one idea and apply it that week, in how you lead, collaborate, or advocate.

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Follow a WEA Leader’s work. Women’s Earth Alliance profiles individual leaders like Rebecca Jim on its site and in its newsletter. Pick one whose region or issue you care about and follow their specific project, not just the organization’s general updates.

Back a women-led network where you live. Look up a local chapter, mutual aid group, professional network, or community organization led by women, and consider joining or supporting it in a concrete way. Show up to one event, volunteer one shift, amplify one campaign, or set up a small recurring donation.

Find your own Athena. Athena Collective runs as an open, omni-channel community — not a closed membership club. If you’re a woman building a business, request access to their network directly. If you’re not, look for the equivalent in your own field: a women-led professional group with regular meetups, not just a directory.

Support women on the front lines in Sudan. Donate to Women for Women International’s Sudan Crisis Response Fund. If you want something more personal, you can also support their “Stand With Her” program, which matches you with a woman in a year-long program in a conflict-affected country. You can exchange messages of support and receive updates as she builds skills to strengthen her life and community.