'A Bolder Way Forward' continues building bridges for women in Utah

Rebecca Olds 

Building a bridge can be hard. It can be hard because each slat needs to connect and without railings, it’s easy to fall into the water below.

Susan Madsen, founder of a Utah-based initiative striving for equality for women through the Utah Women and Leadership Project, compared the “A Bolder Way Forward” initiative to a bridge, with each slat a step forward toward girls and women thriving in Utah.

“We’re building the bridge as we’re walking on it,” she said. “Right now we can see a few more slats than we did last year because we’ve laid more slats down.”

Madsen addressed a crowd of hundreds of women dotted with several men at the second annual summit of A Bolder Way Forward when she introduced the bridge analogy and reviewed the past year’s progress toward a more equitable state. Also present at the conference were several state and local leaders, including Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who also spoke at the event.

“How can we not lean in if we love our daughters and granddaughters, our neighbors and friends?” Madsen said. “We have to have a state where more girls and women and their families feel safe. We have to do more.”

Year 1

This past year, the organization has focused on creating the foundation for the seven-year project and made significant progress toward its lofty goals of elevating the state from last in women’s equality, per a 2023 WalletHub study, to 46th before 2030.

“Sometimes our bridge of this work in the state of Utah is a little slippery. We can slide, we can hit the edges, but hopefully we won’t go off the edge into the frozen river,” Madsen said.

Madsen said the major accomplishments this year by the initiative included hiring a team for several committees, creating 29 different county coalitions across the state, creating campus collaboratives, launching a newsletter, releasing research on women in the state and starting a podcast.

“We do so much, as women, without any money — we sacrifice, we push forward and we do our best,” Madsen said. “But this work will not continue forward in the way we need it to ... unless significant funding starts flooding into Utah for ... any nonprofit organization in the state of Utah that is doing things for girls and women.”

Year 2

The second year is focused on connecting and expanding to aid in funding and getting the word out about the initiative. The goal is to have 10,000 people involved by the end of the initiative’s second year and doubling it to 20,000 the following year.

Madsen said that as the initiative works to combine all the separate pieces of the bridges built by women across the state, the second year of the initiative will be “historic.”

“This really is historic. No other state is doing this,” Madsen said. “This is going to be powerful this year.”

“We in the state of Utah have been sleeping around these issues. They’re uncomfortable and we don’t want to talk about them, but we have to move forward,” she said. “We have to start waking up everyone around and help them understand what the issues are and how we can make them change.”

When Henderson addressed the crowd before Madsen, she said that each person there had a vital role to play in the initiative, telling everyone “to work on your piece,” and “more people are with you than against you.”

“We can be a national leader on how to transform a state with violence issues ... into a state where more women and girls can truly thrive,” Madsen said, “and that means that our families better thrive and that means that boys and men thrive.”