Jacqueline Sterbach
Jacqueline Sterbach is the President and Founder of What Is Your Voice, Inc., a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering survivors of domestic violence, addressing homelessness, and advancing systemic justice reform in Delaware. A survivor herself, Jacqueline has spent more than 15 years working in the domestic violence field, conducting extensive research and applying lived experience to advocacy and policy solutions. What began as a vision written in her kitchen has grown over the past 12 years into a full community campus built from the ground up — providing low-income transitional housing for survivors and their children, campus-based offices, mental health counseling, and case management services. Through an affiliation with the Delaware Food Bank, her organization works to ensure that survivors and vulnerable families can access food, housing, and trauma-informed support services in one centralized location, reducing the re-traumatization that can occur when survivors must navigate multiple systems to meet their basic needs.
Prior to founding her nonprofit, Jacqueline built a successful career as a business executive in professional marketing. She was the first woman hired in nearly 150 years at one of her former companies, where she was initially placed in an isolated work environment she describes as “Cell Block H,” working with minimal resources. Despite the barriers she faced, Jacqueline broke company performance records and ultimately rose to become a director, earning national recognition including an eight-page feature in the company’s corporate magazine. She credits her corporate experience with giving her the strategic, operational, and leadership skills necessary to build a nonprofit organization from the ground up, even without prior experience in nonprofit management. As a visionary leader, she approaches challenges as opportunities for experimentation and learning, continuously pivoting and refining strategies to better serve the community.
Today, What Is Your Voice operates as a community-driven advocacy and service organization supported by approximately 100 volunteers. The campus currently includes nine residential housing openings for survivors, along with comprehensive support services for mental health, addiction recovery, and trauma healing. Jacqueline also actively works with unhoused women living in rural and wooded areas, recognizing that approximately 80% of women experiencing homelessness have survived some form of violence. Her mission is to build systems of care that meet survivors where they are while advancing policy, education, and community collaboration. Through her work, Jacqueline continues to transform pain into purpose, leading a movement centered on safety, dignity, and survivor empowerment.
• Wilmington University - BSW
• Jefferson Award for Sussex County
• Jefferson Award for the State of Delaware
• Jefferson Award Nationals Finalist
• Featured in Sussex County Women's Journal
• Delaware Violence Task Force
• Delaware Advocates for Nonprofits (DANA)
• Delaware Anti-Violence Agency (Co-Chair)
• Speak Out Against Hate (SOA)
• Delaware Technical Community College Human Services Board
• Community partnerships through MOUs with BB Mobile Services
• Open Minds Therapy
• Delaware Food Bank affiliate serving the community
• Back-to-school campaigns with over 100 volunteers
• White House Broken Wings
What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to severe resilience and determination, and my faith is what really helped me move forward. As a visionary, I never look at failures as failures, but look at everything as an experiment, learning from that experiment and taking from what was good and letting go quickly of something that wasn't working, being able to quickly pivot and move forward. Everything I went through in my past built me and empowered me to be able to push through and break down walls and open up conversations that people didn't want to talk about. I know my faith has been drawing me in a path, and I've been following that. I pray that I do no harm, no harm comes to me, and pray to expand my territory and keep moving. I never look at the mountain that is in front of me, but just take baby steps every day to accomplish what I can do. The community rose up and met us in our need and has been financially supporting us and helping us grow all this time.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would tell her that there's no small business loan for launching a nonprofit. A nonprofit is not supported through the SBA, and you have to have funds to be able to launch it. It's like building as an entrepreneur, building something on your own. What I did, and my partner did, we took our retirement resources that we were building, and we used that to launch a nonprofit. So launching a nonprofit is an extreme sacrifice that you do because you know the outcome and the changes that are so desperately needed in lives that you're willing to do anything you can and give anything you can to be able to build something that never exists and make it happen. I would help her understand the process, what she needs to get a 501c3, the pieces that need to be accomplished before you can even file for that, and I would just be her biggest cheerleader all along the way. I would help her connect in any way that I can connect her, because I didn't have a connector, but I am a connector now for other women, and I will open any door I can to help any woman achieve any kind of dream or passion that she's trying to accomplish to make where we live a better community.
What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
My focus is to break the generational cycle of poverty and violence that gets passed down from one generation to the next, and open the pathway for the younger generation and the current generation to know there's another way, a new normal. When you don't know any other normal than what you know, it's important to show there's hope. I feel this is my calling, and what has been developed here came from my own journey and the things that I have lived and passed through during that process. I believe women need to empower each other and mentor each other and help each other rise up. The generation before me laid their life down so that I can go where I'm going, and we're laying our life and mantles down so the next generation can go further, and that synergy is very important. I'm a big believer in helping any woman that comes here or meets with me in wanting to know how to accomplish something. It's not about me, it's never been about me, it's about others. I want to take the pain of your past and move it into a whole arena of healing for others.