Women in Business 2011

Women In Business October 23, 2011

By GREG JOHNSONFrontiersman

WASILLA — When examining the business climate of a fast-grow-ing Mat-Su Valley, it’s hard to ignore one of the largest gorillas in the room — health care. And the silverback in the pack is Mat-Su Regional Medical Center.

Since the hospital opened in 2006, it has sparked one of the true growth industries of an area that’s seen its population explode over the past two decades. Along with gov-ernment and the Mat-Su Borough School District, the hospital is one of the Valley’s largest employers.

At the heart of Mat-Su Regional is the Mat-Su Health Foundation, the charitable arm of the hospital that not only distributes millions of dol-lars annually throughout the com-munity, but has a significant owner-ship stake in the facility.

And at the heart of the founda-tion is executive director Elizabeth Ripley. She guides a foundation that granted $4.2 million in 2010 and is building a $100 million trust to establish a baseline annual granting potential of at least $5 million.

That’s big business, and as a woman, Ripley said she’s proud of her success that may have been dif-ficult for a woman in her position a generation ago.

“Personally, I have not found my gender to be a barrier to climbing up the proverbial career ladder, nor a hindrance in any business rela-tionship that I’ve had to date,” she said. “My personal experience is I’ve been treated fairly and equitably.”

The success of Ripley and the foundation is reflective of a national

trend for women-owned and women-led businesses. According to a 2009 study commissioned by the Center for Women’s Business Research, women-owned busi-nesses account for nearly $3 trillion in economic impact.

“The significance of the total amount of economic impact — $2.8 trillion — once again proves that women-owned firms are not a small niche market, but are a major con-tributor in the overall economy,”

the study says. Because more than 99 percent of all businesses are classified as small, “it also reveals the magnitude of importance that small business plays in the overall economy.”

In the Valley, the success of the Mat-Su Health Foundation is reflected in the support it gives to local agencies and projects. Those include $1 million for the Palmer senior center and another $1 mil-lion for the new Nugen’s Ranch

addiction rehabilitation center.That doesn’t mean there aren’t

still trails to be blazed in the Valley for women in business, she said.

“There is still an old boy network and still some of the typical patri-archal infrastructure that’s a part of business,” she said. “But, generally speaking, I personally have found a way to work and weave trough infrastructure to focus on results

‘Good ol’ girl’ network growsRipley plays pivotal role in local health care industry

ROBERT DeBERRY/Frontiersman file photoAs executive director for the Mat-Su Health Foundation, Elizabeth Ripley steers an organization that distributed $4.2 million in the community in 2010.

See RIPLEy, Page 3

October 23, 2011 Women In Business

and the business at hand.”She also is proud to be an example

for her daughter, a 20-year-old col-lege student.

“I remember back when I was growing up and when they show clips of presidents running in the past or talk shows focusing on polit-ical or business matters, the people in those shots are all white men,” she said. “And now I look around and that’s not what I see. (My daughter) doesn’t see barriers to what she can be. I don’t either. I cer-tainly didn’t feel like I was limited, but when I look back, it’s incredible and it doesn’t look like the room of executives I sit in today. It’s much different and, I would argue, much better today.”

HER cALLING

For Ripley, the road to the Valley and her role at the foundation was unexpected.

After pursuing an undergraduate degree in English and communica-tions at Western Maryland College, Ripley went on to earn a Master’s of Arts and Religion from Yale University. That was in 1990, two decades and more than 4,400 miles removed from the Mat-Su Valley.

“I wanted to be a minister, so I

went to divinity school,” Ripley said in a 2010 interview. While her aspi-rations for a ministry in the United Methodist Church were never real-ized, she is content in the role she plays helping Valley people.

Given Ripley’s strong religious roots and education, it’s not sur-prising to learn her journey to the Valley was as much a leap of faith as an adventure.

Following her graduation from Yale in 1990, Ripley and husband Ed set off for the Last Frontier.

“Literally a month later we hit the Alcan and drove up here,” she said.

Their only plan was that Ed, who was certified to teach in the state, would find a job somewhere.

“I still laugh when I tell people that when we got to the border, the state trooper at the border said, ‘So, how long are you going to stay in Alaska?’” Ripley said. “We said, ‘We’re going to live here,’ and we had no jobs or anything.”

Ed found a job teaching in Kodiak, “and we had a ball in Kodiak, an absolute ball,” she said. But trying financial times quickly

changed their prospects. “We’d still be there, I think, but they laid off all their first-year teachers and cut our health insurance — and I was preg-nant. That was a game-changer. That was in 1991, and that’s when we moved here.”

It didn’t take the couple long to establish deep roots in the com-munity. Their first child, Emily (a 2010 Wasilla High School graduate) was born, followed by their second, Noah, now a WHS student. Ed is a student favorite as a math teacher at WHS.

Ripley had been to the Valley before as a junior varsity basketball

coach in Kodiak. When the family moved to Wasilla, she coached here as well, the C basketball team and girls soccer.

It was in 1992 about a year after Emily was born that Ripley found what would evolve into her personal ministry for health and well-being. She went to work with Hospice of Mat-Su, which at the time was a department of Valley Hospital.

“The nice thing about Hospice was that spiritual issues often come to the forefront, so it was a nice fit,” she said. “I was the volunteer coor-dinator and helped it become the first Medicare-certified Hospice in the state. From there, my career in heath care just took off.”

By 1995, Ripley had become direc-tor of marketing for the hospital, which included being the point person for disseminating informa-

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ripleyContinued from Page 2

‘There is still an old boy network and still some of the typical patri-archal infrastructure that’s a part of business. But, generally speak-ing, I personally have found a way to work and weave trough infra-structure to focus on results and the business at hand.’

—Elizabeth Ripley

See RIPLEy, Page 7


By ANDREW WELLNERFrontiersman

MAT-SU — Back in 2002, Karen Harris, now owner of Alaska Gar-den Gate Bed and Breakfast, felt called by God to move to Alaska.

She was working as a journalist at the time. When she decided to move she interviewed with a few local newspapers, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue in that field.

“As I thought about it and looked into things I thought, ‘well, maybe a bed and breakfast,’” she said.

It just so happened that right around that time the Mat-Su Bed and Breakfast Association was hav-ing a workshop for people who wanted to break into the industry.

“I flew up to Alaska to go to that and I was just completely floored by these women who presented at the workshops there,” she said.

There were men, too, she said, but the women were inspiring. And there were a lot of them. It’s hard for her to say definitively that women dominate the B&B indus-try, but they do seem to be more involved in industry associations and organizations, Harris said. She

thinks it’s a type of business that is easy to fit into a person’s lifestyle, appealing to different categories of women.

“Women later in life who may not need a large income, maybe a small income” seem to find it appealing, she said. “If they have a different kind of source of income as a pri-mary source, this could be some-thing that they dabble in and enjoy guests when they’d like to.”

Even young mothers, she said, seem to try their hands at running a B&B.

“It could be something that works around having young children,” Harris said. “Trying to have every-thing clean and totally picked up with toddlers around sounds like a nightmare to me, but others do it.”

But what about the tourism industry as a whole? Harris was hesitant to say the industry is any-thing but an even split between men and women. Hunting and fish-

ing guides tend to be men, which might balance out the woman-heavy B&B industry. Harris is a board member of the Mat-Su Con-vention and Visitors Bureau and a former president of that body. She noted that the board is pretty evenly split between men and women.

The current board president, Dee Dee Kay, said she thinks women are well suited to success in the tour-ism game and have been successful across a broad range of tourism businesses.

“It crosses all segments and I do believe one of the reasons really is that when you come to Alaska, you want that person to meet you that is warm and is really, ‘mothering’ isn’t really the right word,” Kay said. “You kind of feel like you’re visit-ing your aunt. That’s the kind of experience and I think Alaska really lends itself to that as a destination.”

She said tourism jobs are also appealing to women because they rely so heavily on building relation-ships and teamwork. But one of the biggest factors she sees attracting women is flexibility.

“I think that lots of times the way the world is today women are still

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Tourism a women-friendly industry

See TOURISM, Page 6

‘Women later in life who may not need a large income, maybe a small income (seem to find it appealing). If they have a different kind of source of income as a primary source, this could be some-thing that they dabble in and enjoy guests when they’d like to.’

—Karen Harris


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ROBERT DeBERRY/frontiersmanKaren Harris stands inside one of the rooms at her Alaska Garden Gate Bed and Breakfast off Trunk Road.

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seen as, in many instances, as the major caregiver for children and families and running the house-hold, and tourism gives people the flexibility to work out of their home,” she said.

It’s been that way for a while.“Long before working out of

the home was something that was acceptable for corporations it was acceptable in tourism and hospital-ity,” she said.

Women who run flightseeing operations, bed and breakfasts or adventure tours can choose when to take on clients and when to keep their schedules free. Harris echoed Kay in saying that flexibility is a big part of the appeal.

Kay said an interesting phenom-enon she’s noticed is that the indus-

try seems to have matured around the women who’ve spent a career in the business.

Some might have started a home business in the tourism field at a time when it was something they could dabble in and maybe bring in some extra money while their hus-bands were working the real bread-winning jobs.

“Tourism, it was seen as a play job. It wasn’t seen as a real job, and thank goodness that has changed,” she said.

She said she knows of more than a few women who started a business that way, but eventually turned that “play job” into a full-time, mon-eymaking breadwinner’s job. And now the husband has quit his for-mer job and is there working right alongside them making the busi-ness successful.

Harris said she was inspired by the women who came before

her, like Helen Munoz of A-Lazy Acres Bed and Breakfast and Janet Kincaid, who ran Valley Hotel for years.

“These are just strong women who are smart and worked so hard,” she said.

It’s made her want to be active in industry groups and inspire the next generation.

Asked what appeals to her about running a B&B, she said it’s the business side of it.

“It’s always been so interesting to experiment with the marketing and see where you get the results and be involved locally, but also try to keep up with trends in Internet market-ing,” she said.

She said other parts of the job were more intimidating. But things that she thought would be hard wound up being easy. An example? Decorating and furniture arrange-ment.

“I was so worried that people wouldn’t like what I have to offer, but this has proved to be a very popular spot,” she said. “I kind of guessed right on with people’s

tastes and how they like the place set up.”

But, she said, the business is a lot of hard work doing a whole lot of different things — bookkeep-ing, cleaning, cooking, marketing, maintenance. It takes a bit of multi-tasking sometimes.

Kay would agree. She said she thinks multitasking is something women might just be more dis-posed to than men. Another? Working without supervision.

Don’t get her wrong, Kay said. Plenty of men are good at both of those things, too.

“Nobody is a business owner that doesn’t have the skill of being able to be their own boss,” Kay said.

But she thinks that women, at least traditionally, have had more experience with it.

“The person that has to take care of the home, you don’t have a boss,” she said. “It’s not like your boss is standing over you watching what you do.”

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TOUriSMContinued from Page 4

‘Long before working out of the home was something that was acceptable for corporations it was acceptable in tourism and hospitality. ... These are just strong women who are smart and worked so hard.’

—Karen Harris


tion to the public. It was a position she would hold for eight years dur-ing some of the most important changes at the hospital. During her tenure, the current Mat-Su Regional Hospital was built, a $100 million project.

It wasn’t until Jan. 1, 2008, that she became director for the Mat-Su Health Foundation.

In the nearly four years Rip-ley’s been at the foundation, it’s increased its granting capacity from $1.7 million to $4.2 million. The next goal is a 10-year project to establish the $100 million trust so the foundation can guarantee a baseline level of funding every year.

“You’re going to see that level off with a trust,” she said. “The way it works is, if the hospital is profitable, we earn our ownership share of the profits. We have to invest our own-

ership share in the capital.”What’s left is what the foundation

can use to grant.“If the hospital purchases a new

MRI or wants to add another wing, we have to pay for a quarter of that,” she said. “But operationally, our dollars cannot flow back through to the bottom line of the hospital, or that would jeopardize our tax-exempt status.”

Now 20 years after Ripley and her husband packed up and traversed North America, she’s still commit-ted to a ministry.

“I believe we’re called to use the gifts we have to do the most good, help people in our neighborhood and across the world,” Ripley said. “So, No. 1 is applying your gifts, which I hope I’m doing here. The second is about walking the talk. It’s not about an act of piety as much as demonstrating (morals) in how you live and work to improve the lot of others to enjoy life.”

Mat-Su Regional Medical

center is one of the

largest employers in

the Valley. As a stake-

holder in the facility,

the Mat-Su Health

Foundation uses its share

of revenues to support

its chari-table efforts

to accom-plish its

mission of promoting

health.

ROBERT DeBERRY/

Frontiersman file photo

ripleyContinued from Page 3

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Women in Business 2011

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