The Woman Behind The Women’s Network

Vicki Donlan is in her element. As she talks to one female business owner, she reassures her that the challenges she is facing can be conquered. She reminds another woman that there are only 24 hours in a day, putting emphasis on the balance required to run a small business, reports boston.com.

She is in the process of touching base with approximately six key members from the South Shore Women’s Business Network. She co-founded the group in 1991, and has continued to shape the group as its executive director.

Donlan, a woman in possession of what her 34-year-old son, David Donlan, a successful businessman himself, calls “an electric level of energy,’’ is doing what she does well: She organizes people, builds business enterprises, and delivers the goods with a level of consistency and success that is almost uncanny, as if she is the recipient of a kind of outsized entrepreneurial gene.

“I do believe it is in my blood,’’ she said in an interview at her Hingham condominium earlier that morning, after returning from a daily 3-mile walk, a ritual of more than 33 years.

Among other things, Donlan was the first executive director of the Commonwealth Institute, a nonprofit formed by a dozen female chief executives in Boston to assist women entrepreneurs; the founder of Women’s Business, a monthly trade newspaper, sold to the Boston Herald in 2004; a former entrepreneur-in-residence at Bridgewater State University; and the author of “Her Turn: Why It’s Time for Women to Lead in America’’. She currently is a business consultant.

Logo from South Shore Women’s Business Network

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *