Built Out of Necessity: The Story Behind Spokane's Women's Economic Infrastructure

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in after you have driven home alone from your third networking event in a month, business cards in your pocket, and not a single real conversation to show for it.

You shook hands. You introduced yourself. You said what you do and listened while someone else said what they do. You smiled across a room full of people who would forget your name by morning. And you drove home wondering whether the problem was the room, the format, the city, or you.

For Stephanie, that question became the foundation of something she didn't yet have a name for.

The Networking Circuit That Went Nowhere

To build a client base in a new city, she did what every business development playbook recommends: she went to everything.

Chambers of commerce. Women's professional groups. Industry mixers. Monthly luncheons. Happy hours. Anything on the calendar with the word "networking" attached to it, she showed up.

And she kept leaving with little or nothing she could use.

"I would only see people at networking events," she says. "And then it was kind of a — never went anywhere after that. Not even friendships. No relationships, really. And those friendships that I did form — as soon as I pivoted or changed my business, those relationships changed or diminished. So it was very much a superficial relationship."

What made it stranger was what happened when she started asking questions. When she mentioned a group she'd been to, people who had lived in Spokane for decades — people who were born and raised here — had never heard of it. And when she mentioned her own discoveries to others, they'd respond with groups she'd never heard of either.

"Did you know about this networking group? Did you know about this one?" she recalls. "Even people who had been here for twenty years hadn't heard of some of the groups I'd gone to."

There was no map. No connective tissue. No central place that answered the most basic question a person new to a community needs answered: how do I find my people?

The resources existed. They were scattered across the city, tucked into neighborhoods, organized by industry, accessible only if you happened to know someone who happened to know someone. For a woman rebuilding her professional life in a city that was still relatively new to her, the landscape was rich and almost entirely invisible.

The Deeper Problem

The more she talked to other women, the more she heard the same thing back. Not just the logistical frustration of not knowing what existed — but something underneath it. A hunger for actual connection that the existing formats weren't satisfying.

"After two years of more or less fishing around to see what people are thinking and how they're reacting and what they're doing," she says, "I came to the conclusion that a lot of women are seeking actual connection."

She had recently encountered the work of a researcher who spoke at a virtual academic conference — the author of a book called The Illusion of Connection — who made an observation that crystallized something Stephanie had been circling for months. The argument, roughly, was this: social media had collapsed the categories we use to organize our relationships. Friends, acquaintances, coworkers, neighbors — they had all been merged into a single undifferentiated feed of "friends," which meant that being a friend had become as low-effort as clicking a button.

"Being a friend is as easy as clicking the like button," she says. "And that's not really friendship."

What was missing, she had come to believe, was intentionality. The adult friendships and professional relationships that sustain people over time don't form automatically. They require structure. They require repeated proximity, shared experience, the willingness to ask a deeper question, and sit with the answer.

"We're not taught how to make friends as an adult," she says. "I strongly believe that we are proximity-relationship-based. In grade school, our friends are our schoolmates, our neighborhood kids. But by the time you're an adult, if you don't have kids — or even if you do — it's not really as intentional. And especially with the world as divided as it is today, making sure that you are intentionally building those foundations for relationships is what we're missing."

The networking circuit wasn't failing because the people in it were bad or the organizations running it were incompetent. It was failing because the format — show up, shake hands, say what you do, leave — was structurally incapable of producing what people were actually there for.

The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back

In 2025, a conversation changed everything.

The Women's Business Center, which had operated as part of SNAP in Spokane, closed its local office. With it went the annual Women in Business Summit — a gathering that had provided a rare structured space for women across industries to connect, learn, and access resources. Its absence left a gap that a handful of women in the community decided needed filling.

Stephanie found herself in a group of six women trying to figure out how to build something to replace it. The conversation quickly surfaced what she had been observing for two years: the fragmentation, the invisibility of resources, the lack of infrastructure connecting women to each other and to what they needed.

The conversations they were having, the responses they were getting, the women who were showing up and saying, "This is exactly what we need" —all of it confirmed what she had suspected for two years.

This wasn't a personal problem. This was a systemic one.

And someone needed to build the infrastructure to address it.

HIKE Is Not a Hiking Group

Here is the thing she has to say to almost everyone who hears the name for the first time.

HIKE is not a hiking group.

Or rather — it is, occasionally, literally. There are seasonal outdoor events on actual trails. But that is not the point.

HIKE is an acronym: Her Innovation Knowledge Empowerment. The name came out of a brainstorming process that kept running into dead ends — "Found-Her," "Invest-Her," compound words that turned out to be taken, names that didn't quite capture the scope of what she was trying to build. The acronym came from a memory of an organization called WAVE — Women of Action, Vision, and Empowerment — that she had encountered decades earlier, working at Sony. She had always loved the idea of a name that meant something beyond itself.

"HIKE on its own couldn't be trademarked," she says. "So HIKE with Her kind of just reinforces that we are on the trail. We're on the path together — we might have different detours that we each make, and different shoes that we're walking in, but we're all on this path together."

The organization she has built around that name is now less than a year old. It includes a searchable business directory — at hikedirectory.com — that lists women-led businesses and professionals across the Inland Northwest. It includes community programming: a quarterly flagship event called HIKE Lab; a monthly in-person Happy Hour Tour that rotates through Spokane's neighborhoods; a monthly virtual drop-in called the Pajama Party; and seasonal outdoor hikes. It includes an Inner Circle newsletter that goes out every week and, she says, generates more personal responses than almost anything else she does.

It is, in her words, connective tissue. Not a networking group. Not a membership club. Infrastructure.

The Weight of Building It

What visitors to the website don't see is what it costs to keep the lights on.

Every piece of the infrastructure — the technology, the marketing, the platform, the programming — is funded out of her own pocket. There are paid directory members, and she says she is genuinely grateful for each one. There are sponsorship opportunities available for organizations that want to invest in the ecosystem. But the business is not yet sustainable in a way that would allow her to stop relying on her own resources and start relying on the community's.

"I'm not looking necessarily for funding of my time, although that would be absolutely great," she says. "But it's more funding for the infrastructure so that we can continue to grow and develop."

What changes when that funding exists, she says, is not the mission — it's the bandwidth. Right now, she is working in the business: sending the newsletter, managing the platforms, handling marketing, and handling events. What she wants to be doing is working on the business: building the community, deepening the programming, and developing the capital pillar that will eventually connect women across the Inland Northwest to grants, loans, scholarships, and financial resources.

"I can work on the business rather than working in the business," she says. "That's the biggest practical impact."

What the Numbers Say

The case for building this is not just personal. It is structural.

73% of Spokane County women ages 16 and older are in the labor force, according to the Washington Employment Security Department. Nearly eighty percent of Spokane mothers with school-age children are working. One in five employer firms in Spokane County is women-owned — 1,977 businesses. Across Washington State, women own 46.5 percent of all businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

These are not small numbers. They represent a workforce that is enormous, active, economically significant, and — in Stephanie's observation — largely disconnected from itself.

"If we want community resilience," she says, "if we want to have a strong community that will withstand this test of time and grow and thrive — we need to invest in women."

A Year In, the Bones Are Good

HIKE with Her is not yet a year old.

It was born as Empower Spokane, rebranded in mid-2025, and has been operating in its current form for less than twelve months. The advisory board is new. The directory is growing. The programming is finding its rhythm.

Stephanie is honest about where things stand. The validation has been real — the women who show up at events, who respond to the newsletter, who say this is exactly what I needed — but validation and sustainability are not the same thing, and she knows it.

"The bones are good," she says. "We need engagement to see how it all grows and what the community needs. At the end of the day, this is not about what I need or want, but what actually makes an impact locally. What moves the needle in a way that supports local women."

That is not the language of someone who doubts what she's building. It is the language of someone who has spent two years watching a problem go unsolved, decided to solve it herself, and is doing so with the particular combination of pragmatism and stubbornness that tends to characterize the people who actually finish things.

The room she kept driving home from was the wrong room. So she built a better one.