Twelve Summers of Interns: What Peace Through Business Taught Me About Empowering Women

The kitchen is the first room awake. I come down before sunrise, start the coffee, and lay out fruit and yogurt at the long table where, in a few minutes, a woman who flew here from Kigali or Kabul will sit down and ask me a question I have not thought about in years. One summer, before I had even poured my own cup, an intern looked up from her notebook and said, “How did you decide what to charge when you started your first company?” I stood there with the carafe in my hand, and I realized I was about to teach the most important thing I know to a woman who had crossed an ocean to learn it. That is how almost every morning of the last twelve summers has started in our home.

I have hosted Peace Through Business interns in my house every summer since 2014. I have used my businesses as a ministry for women empowerment for longer than that, but this program is the place where that conviction stops being a phrase and turns into a real woman sitting at my breakfast table. After more than a decade of summers, I want to write down what I have learned, because I think more Oklahomans should know this program exists, and because I think the women who built it deserve to be named.

What Peace Through Business actually is

Peace Through Business is a seventeen-plus-year entrepreneurship training and mentorship program run by the Enterprising Women Foundation, a 501(c)(3) based in Cary, North Carolina, and founded by Monica Smiley. Monica is the longtime publisher of Enterprising Women magazine, and she built the foundation around a simple thesis: when you train and connect women business owners across borders, you produce economic stability, and economic stability produces peace. Peace Through Business grew out of an earlier program first launched through the Institute for Economic Empowerment of Women (IEEW), and it has carried the IEEW name in the entrepreneurial community for nearly two decades.

The program recruits women entrepreneurs from Afghanistan and Rwanda, gives them a structured business education in their home country, and then brings a cohort to the United States each summer for an in-country mentorship leg. That second leg is where Oklahoma comes in. Interns are matched with American women business owners who host them at home and at work, so the women see how a U.S. company actually runs — not from a conference seat, but from the passenger seat of the owner’s truck on the way to a job site.

How I got involved

I did not go looking for this program. The program found me, the way most of the best things in my life have. Back in 2014, [TODO: introducer’s name and role — mutual friend, chamber connection, or board colleague who first told Ginger about Peace Through Business] told me there was a foundation looking for Oklahoma City host families, and that the women coming through were not students in the abstract sense. They were already business owners. They had employees, customers, and risk on the line back home. They were coming here to learn how to scale.

I said yes before I had thought it through, which is usually a sign I should say yes. The first summer was a long stretch of figuring out the practical pieces — airport pickups, grocery preferences, how to fit a guest’s prayer schedule around a workday, what to do when an intern wanted to talk about pricing at ten at night because that was the only quiet hour she had. I learned more in those first eight weeks than I had in the prior eight years of running my own companies. We have hosted every summer since.

Three things hosting interns has taught me

1. Empowerment is a transfer of specifics, not encouragement

Before I started hosting, I would have said empowering women meant telling them they could do it. After twelve summers, I know that is the smallest part. What these women actually need from me is the boring detail: the spreadsheet I use to price a commercial bid, the exact script I use when a customer pushes back on an invoice, the way I run a Monday morning huddle, the question I ask a new hire on day three. They do not need a pep talk. They need the tape. Every time I have stopped giving general advice and started handing over specifics, the intern in front of me has straightened up and started taking notes faster than I could talk.

2. The American small-business playbook is more transferable than I assumed

I used to wonder whether what works in Oklahoma City could possibly apply in Kabul or Kigali. The honest answer, after a dozen summers, is: more than I thought, and not in the ways I expected. The cultural pieces are different, the regulatory pieces are wildly different, and the access to capital is on another planet. But the core operating disciplines — knowing your unit economics, training a team, building a referral pipeline, separating the owner from the operator — translate almost cleanly. What does not translate I have learned to stop translating. The interns are better judges than I am of what fits their context. My job is to lay the parts out on the table.

3. I am the one being mentored

This is the part I did not see coming. These women have built companies in conditions I cannot imagine. They have managed staff through power outages, currency swings, and security threats I will never face in Oklahoma. The first summer, I thought I was the teacher. By the third summer, I had stopped pretending. Now I keep a notebook on the kitchen counter during their stay, and I write down what they say about resilience, about staffing under pressure, about negotiating with men who do not expect to negotiate with them. I have rewritten parts of how I run Clean Oklahoma and Encore Medical because of conversations that started over breakfast.

Why this matters for Oklahoma women’s leadership

Oklahoma City has a real and growing ecosystem for women in business. The Greater OKC Chamber’s Women’s Council, the Edmond Chamber, and the State Chamber all do meaningful work. We have women running banks, hospitals, law firms, construction companies, and ministries here. But an ecosystem only proves itself when it is willing to look outward as well as inward, and Peace Through Business is one of the cleanest ways I know for Oklahoma women to do that.

When a Rwandan business owner sits in on a Women’s Council meeting in OKC, two things happen at once. She picks up something useful, and the Oklahoma women in the room remember that what they are doing matters at a scale larger than their own quarter. I have watched local executives walk out of a single coffee with a Peace Through Business intern visibly recalibrated about their own ambition. That is not a soft outcome. That is leadership development that no conference can manufacture. If we want OKC to be a serious city for women entrepreneurs, hosting the world’s women entrepreneurs is part of how we earn that.

How to support Peace Through Business

If you live in Oklahoma City and you have read this far, here is what I would ask of you. There are three good ways in.

• Host an intern. A summer placement is roughly [TODO: confirm current hosting window length — commonly cited as ~3 to 4 weeks for the U.S. mentorship leg]. You give her a bedroom, a seat in your operation, and your honest answers. The foundation handles logistics, vetting, and program structure.

• Donate to the Enterprising Women Foundation. The foundation is a 501(c)(3) and runs the program with a lean team. Contributions fund training, travel, and program operations. Visit enterprisingwomenfoundation.org to give.

• Attend an event. When the cohort comes through the U.S., there are receptions and roundtables that are open to chamber members and program supporters. Show up. Ask the interns about their companies, not about their countries.

If you want to talk through what hosting is actually like in an Oklahoma City home before you commit, reach out to me. I am happy to walk anyone through it.

Twelve summers in

I do not know how many more summers we will host. I hope many. What I do know is that some of the women who have sat at my table are now running businesses that employ other women, who employ other women, who employ other women. None of that shows up in a metric I can post on my website. It shows up in the next photo I get on my phone, years later, of an intern’s new storefront in a city I will probably never visit. That is the only return on investment I have ever needed from this work. And it is enough.

If you are an Oklahoma business owner curious about Peace Through Business or about hosting an intern, I would love to hear from you. You can also read more about my civic work, including inside the 2024 Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame Gala, why a clean facility matters in trauma recovery, and how to join a nonprofit board in Oklahoma City.