Beatrice Williason

I attribute my success to staying focused. When you stay focused on your goals and what you want to achieve, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. That focus has been what has helped me get as far as I have in my career and in building the Maisha Project over these past 20 years.

One of the biggest pieces of advice I have received is simple but powerful: consistency. If you stay consistent, you can always achieve any goal you want. That advice always kicks loud to me, and it has been a guiding principle throughout my career. It may seem simple, but it is definitely powerful and has made all the difference in my journey.

I would encourage women to always be bold and put their best foot forward. Women get marginalized in different areas, and different areas define that marginalization in different ways. In Africa, you can see it vividly. In America here, you see it because of lack of better opportunity for women. But you need to know that we are the biggest cornerstones in every level we are, and that alone should always empower women to be vocal and to be bold in anything they want to do. In any space we are, women, we are the greatest cornerstones. So be bold, be vocal, and never forget your value.

The biggest opportunity in my field is volunteerism and study abroad programs. We give people here locally in Oklahoma the opportunity to see another world. I have taken close to 2,000 Americans to my village in Africa, and we believe that there is a coalition of partnership here between the locals and what we are doing in my village in Africa. We coordinate mission trips, and people go there believing they are going to change the world, but their world gets really impacted and changed before anything. We have realized that people need each other around the world. You might go with the mentality that this community is so impoverished and poor, let me go help them. But in their poverty level, they are living with the most important joy - we have everything we ever wanted and we are still not happy, so they are more richer than us. We have never been wrong. Everybody who goes there comes back saying the same thing: I came to make a difference, but I am the one being given. That is the biggest opportunity we have, always serving people and creating the ability for people to go abroad and have their lives transformed. As for challenges, communication was one of the biggest challenges I faced when I started my career. English was one of the hardest things to do, so communication was a big challenge for me. Lack of better communication really does not bring out clarity, so people cannot see what you want from them. It is a continuous work in progress, but I have grown through it.

Respect is a big value that is most important to me, and I think people take it for granted. You respect people around you - it does not matter who they are, you respect them for who they are. And in return, that should be given back to you. Respect is a big deal in both my work and personal life, and it guides how I interact with everyone I encounter.