Learning How to Build a Village with Woman-Owned Wallet

By Alisha Proffitt Photos By Matt Johnson 

You could say that Woman-Owned Wallet began with a bit of a personal reckoning. Its founder, Amanda Dare, did not arrive at community work with a ‘how to’ guide, but rather through lived experience and a gradual understanding of what had been missing. 

“At the heart of this idea is my personal story and how it led me to become a community guide. Not as an expert with answers, but as someone who learned, very slowly and imperfectly, how to build connection when it didn’t come naturally,” Dare says. 

Amanda was raised by strong women. Her mother and grandmother taught her independence and how to persist when the going gets tough. While those lessons were both practical and necessary, what went unspoken was how to form closeness with other women, or how to rely on them without fear. 

“What I didn’t realize until much later was that I was deeply craving emotional connection with women and a sense of sisterhood,” she reflects. 

The women who raised her had learned, through experience, to be cautious. Competition felt safer than closeness. Emotional distance was protection. As a result, Amanda learned how to stand on her own, but not how to lean toward others. 

Instead of connection, she learned to build walls. 

For years, self-sufficiency became her personal measure of strength. She pulled away from friends and peers, including the people who cared for her the most. This distance wasn’t because she was indifferent; it came from not knowing how to let others show up for her. That pattern followed her into adulthood and into entrepreneurship, where independence is most often celebrated and rarely questioned. 

Over the last 16 years, Amanda has started and run six businesses. Those years placed her in constant collaboration with others, often women. Business required trust, communication, and vulnerability. The results were mixed. At times, generosity was misunderstood. At others, openness came at a cost. 

Over time, Amanda reached a turning point. Carefully participating no longer felt sufficient. She recognized that building meaningful connections with others required her full engagement, without guarantees or control. That led to the creation of Woman-Owned Wallet. 

In 2019, shortly after moving into Louisville’s NuLu neighborhood, the idea began with Woman-Owned Wallet: The Tour of NuLu. The self-guided walking tour connected NuLu visitors to woman-owned businesses throughout the neighborhood. Her goal was pretty straightforward. Support all of them. Build relationships across storefronts. Encourage shared visibility. 

Woman-Owned Wallet is a response to a structural gap. Traditional investment systems were rarely built for women, so many women-owned businesses lack capital and visibility. WOW relies on community investors, people who choose where to spend with intention and reinvest in everyday life. 

At launch, the tour included fewer than 30 woman-owned businesses. This coming month, that number will exceed 50, all within the same walkable area. The growth is what happens when a community is built with intention and when success is collective rather than designed only for the individual. 

That growth also led Amanda to reconsider a common phrase: it takes a village. 

No one had ever taught her how to be a villager. 

She had to learn how to ask for help. She had to learn how to show up without having everything figured out. She had to learn that trust develops over time, not through singular moments. 

As Amanda practiced these skills, she noticed how common the struggle was. Many people around her wanted connection too, but did not know how to enter it. Going alone felt intimidating. Asking for support felt uncomfortable. The desire for community coexisted with uncertainty about how to start. 

That realization led to her next phase of the work: Woman-Owned Wallet: The Show. 

The series follows Amanda throughout Louisville, and eventually beyond, as she practices community building in real time. She attends small gatherings. She asks questions. She offers support. She documents the process of participation. She does not present herself as an authority, but instead acts as a guide.