Julie Castro Abrams

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Julie Castro Abrams is a gender and racial justice activist who has spent her career working at the intersection of women’s leadership, entrepreneurship, and economic equity. As founder and CEO of How Women Lead, she has built a network of 25,000 top executive women who come together to learn, break barriers, get on boards, and make an impact. Under her leadership, How Women Lead championed California’s groundbreaking Senate Bill 826, requiring public companies to have women on their boards, and has helped thousands of women secure corporate board seats.

In 2020, she launched How Women Invest, an early-stage venture firm focused on high-growth, women-founded companies, to disrupt a venture landscape where only 2% of capital flows to women-led startups. The firm operates on a conviction backed by data: women-founded companies yield 35% higher returns for investors. As a General Partner in two venture funds dedicated to women founders, she is putting that conviction into action.

Before founding How Women Lead, Julie spent 11 years as CEO of Women’s Initiative for Self Employment, where she helped launch over 6,000 women-owned businesses, 70% of which were still operating five years later. She is an advisor to Nia Impact Capital and an IFB Pathfinder whose belief in women’s economic power has been central to IFB’s community from the beginning.

We are honored to celebrate her here.

Susan King

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Golden Seeds was founded in 2004 with a mission as clear as it was urgent: to level the playing field for women entrepreneurs at a time when women were starting 25% of all new companies but receiving less than 3% of startup capital. Two decades later, the national angel network has invested over $200 million in more than 250 women-led companies, becoming one of the most active and respected angel networks in the country.

Susan King serves as Managing Director of Golden Seeds, bringing a remarkable breadth of leadership experience to the role. As former CEO of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, she led the museum’s pioneering use of interactive Survivor holograms and virtual reality products that transformed it from a regional institution to an international leader, while achieving a 700% growth in customers and paying off all debt 30 years ahead of schedule. Previously, she held roles at McKinsey & Company and Goldman Sachs, and authored The New Success Rules for Women.

At Golden Seeds, Susan advances a mission that has helped reshape the early-stage investment landscape: demonstrating that backing women-led companies is not just the right thing to do, but a smart investment strategy. The network’s members span 28 states and continue to invest in every sector, building a more inclusive and equitable future for entrepreneurs and investors alike.

We are honored to celebrate her and the Golden Seeds community here.

Trish Costello

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Trish Costello co-founded the prestigious Kauffman Fellows Program in 1994, creating the first training program for venture capital partners and launching the careers of hundreds of VC leaders, including many women. After more than a decade at the helm of one of the most respected programs in the venture industry, she saw clearly what was not changing: the culture around venture capital still did not reflect how women liked to operate, and traditional VCs were not funding the kinds of founders, products, and solutions that women wanted in the world.

So in 2014, she founded Portfolia, a collaborative equity investing platform designed specifically for women accredited investors who want to learn about venture investing while backing companies that transform lives. Portfolia has since grown to a network of thousands of women investors, over 140 companies in its portfolio, and 14 funds focused on women’s health, active aging, diversity, and sustainability. It is now one of the most active investors in women’s health in the country, with portfolio companies including Maven Clinic, Everly Health Solutions, and Madison Reed.

Trish has keynoted at the United Nations and the OECD, testified before the White House Commission on Women and the US Senate, and was named one of Inc. Magazine’s 15 Most Innovative Women Entrepreneurs. Forbes named her one of Goldman Sachs’ 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs. Her conviction has never changed: women’s financial power, activated and directed intentionally, changes what gets built in the world.

We are honored to celebrate her here.

Alex Wright-Gladstein

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 Alex Wright-Gladstein founded Sphere after discovering a gap that should not exist: over 80% of Americans are worried about climate change, but virtually none of them had a climate-friendly option in their 401(k). She had tried to offer one to employees at her first company, Ayar Labs, which she co-founded to make data centers and supercomputers more energy efficient, and found that no simple, affordable solution existed. So she built it herself.

Sphere offers the Sphere 500 Climate Fund, a fossil-fuel-free index option for 401(k) plans that allows employees at any company to invest their retirement savings in alignment with their climate values while still earning competitive returns. The firm’s AtmoSphere platform helps organizations measure and improve the climate impact of their retirement plans.

Alex holds an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BA in Political Science and Economics from Tufts University. She has served as an advisor to As You Sow, promoting corporate accountability through shareholder action, and as a board member of the Digital Citizen Fund, which empowers women through education and entrepreneurship. She is moving $1.5 trillion in 401(k) assets, the amount currently invested in fossil fuels, toward a different future.

We are honored to celebrate her here.

Deb Wetherby

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Deb Wetherby has spent more than three decades building wealth management the way she believed it should work, without conflicts of interest, with genuine objectivity, and with a deep commitment to serving clients rather than selling to them. In 1990, she founded Wetherby Asset Management, one of the first fee-only RIAs to replace a commission structure that incentivized selling with a model focused entirely on client outcomes.

Over more than 30 years, she built Wetherby into a nationally recognized firm consistently ranked among the Top 50 Fee-Only RIAs and Top 50 Wealth Management RIAs, and recognized as one of the Top 50 Women in Wealth Management. The firm brought industry-leading expertise in impact investing, private markets, and multigenerational estate planning, with a client-first culture that attracted families and individuals with significant wealth who wanted their money managed with integrity.

In 2021, Wetherby joined forces with Laird Norton Wealth Management to create LNW, a $15 billion national RIA and trust company. Deb continues as Managing Partner and board member of the combined firm, which specializes in impact investing and values-aligned wealth management. She is passionate about poverty alleviation, funding women and girls, and creating economic opportunity, and has translated those passions into both her firm’s investment approach and her board work with organizations including the Marin Community Foundation and IDEO.org.

We are deeply honored to celebrate her here.

Patricia Lizarraga

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Patricia Lizarraga is the founder and managing partner of Hypatia Capital, an asset manager with a singular conviction: that women CEOs outperform, and that investors who bet on them will too. She came to that conviction through 30 years of Wall Street experience at firms including Allen & Co, Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, and Citi, where she consistently noticed that the few women she worked with near the top of corporate leadership were exceptional performers.

In 2007, when only ten women were CEOs of S&P 500 companies, she began building the investment thesis that would become Hypatia. Today, the Hypatia Women CEO ETF (WCEO) invests in all American public companies led by female CEOs, providing a market-driven tool for investors who believe that diverse leadership is both a moral imperative and a financial advantage.

Patricia holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and serves as an independent board member and Audit Committee Chair for Credicorp Ltd., the largest financial conglomerate in Peru. She has been focused on investing in women in leadership for nearly two decades, building the data and the products to make the case that closing the gender gap in corporate America is one of the best available investment strategies.

We are honored to celebrate her here.

Cat Berman

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Catherine “Cat” Berman is CEO and co-founder of CNote, a women-led fintech platform that she launched in 2016 with a mission to close the wealth gap through financial innovation. She left a Managing Director role at Charles Schwab after realizing that Community Development Financial Institutions, the federally certified lenders already serving communities that mainstream banks had abandoned, were invisible to the vast majority of investors. The barrier was not interest. It was access. So she built a technology platform to remove it.

CNote deploys corporate and individual cash into loan funds and insured deposit products at impact-driven community financial institutions, advancing economic equality, racial justice, gender equity, and climate solutions. Corporate leaders including Apple, Mastercard, Patagonia, PayPal, and Netflix use CNote’s platform to support low-income communities and communities of color while earning competitive returns.

Cat was named the 2025 Leading Light Award winner by Treasury Today’s Women in Treasury Awards. MasterCard featured her as a pioneering female entrepreneur in a campaign that appeared on Times Square and in the New York Times. A three-time entrepreneur, she has spent her career proving that you do not have to choose between financial performance and community impact.

We are honored to celebrate her here.

Priscilla Sims Brown

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 Priscilla Sims Brown is President and CEO of Amalgamated Bank, a full-service bank with a century-long commitment to advancing positive social change, and the first publicly traded financial institution to be a public benefit corporation.

She joined Amalgamated in 2021 from Commonwealth Bank of Australia, bringing 30 years of financial services experience and a clear-eyed mission: to prove that doing well and doing good are not competing goals. Under her leadership, Amalgamated has grown to $7.9 billion in assets, become fully fossil-fuel-free in its lending, and committed to net zero carbon emissions. More than 60% of the bank’s lending goes to high-impact categories including affordable housing, nonprofits, and climate solutions. She launched the Climate Impact Debit Mastercard, replacing 80% of the fossil-fuel-derived plastics in traditional bank cards.

Priscilla has used her platform to fight for reproductive rights, push for gun purchase tracking codes from major credit card companies, and speak consistently and publicly about the role of financial institutions in advancing social justice. American Banker has named her one of the Most Powerful Women in Banking. CNBC featured her as a Changemaker. Her mother is Ethiopia’s first-ever female senator, and the conviction that finance is a vehicle for justice runs through everything she does.

We are honored to celebrate her here.

Kat Taylor

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Kat Taylor works in service of restoring social, racial, gender justice, and environmental well-being for a more equitable and inclusive world. In 2007, she co-founded Beneficial State Bank, a Community Development Financial Institution and certified B Corporation built on a radical ownership structure: the bank is wholly owned by nonprofits, with the mandate to redistribute any excess funds back into the communities it serves.

Under her board leadership, Beneficial State Bank has implemented a lending program for renewable energy, sustainability entrepreneurs, and net-zero building construction. By the end of 2023, the bank held $26.4 million in outstanding loans to environmentally-focused commercial projects and $109.7 million in residential solar loans. Forbes named her to its inaugural Sustainability Leaders list for her work redefining what banking can be.

Kat is also a co-founder of Radicle Impact Partners venture fund and Founding Director of TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation, which works to build a more sustainable food system. She is fighting to decolonize finance and proposing reform policies at the state and national level to change how banks work for everyone.

We are honored to celebrate her here.

Kristin Hull

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 Kristin Hull has been an impact investor since 2007, when she oversaw the creation of one of the first 100% mission-aligned foundation endowments in the country. She went on to found Nia Community Investments and Nia Community Foundation before creating Nia Impact Capital, a women-led asset management firm headquartered in Oakland that weaves gender-lens and racial equity criteria throughout every investment decision.

Nia’s flagship Global Solutions portfolio has consistently demonstrated that values and returns belong in the same sentence. In 2017, it outperformed the S&P 500 by 15.77%. Investment News named Kristin Portfolio Manager of the Year in its Women to Watch issue in 2025, and Forbes included her on its 50 Over 50 Investment List. Pensions and Investments named her one of its Impactful Women in Institutional Investing in 2026.

She co-founded Impact Hub Oakland and the North Oakland Community Charter School, and serves on the advisory boards of How Women Invest and several nonprofits. She is living proof that changing the face of finance, by hiring and training women and people of color in sustainable and transformative investing, is both possible and profitable.

Kristin is an IFB Circle leader and longtime member of our community. We are honored to celebrate her here.