Chapter 10: Women Entrepreneurs in North Carolina: Rising Together for Community Action After Natural Disaster, Hurricane Helene

This chapter illuminates the strengths of women entrepreneurs under the challenging conditions brought by a natural disaster. Contributions to the field include challenging assumptions and reframing narratives about women entrepreneurs and improving our understanding of feminine capital as a critical community asset. Women entrepreneurs are found to be a critical resource providing community resilience and aiding recovery in the absence of formal institutions such as NGOs or governmental agencies. This work embodies the phenomenology of feminine approaches to entrepreneurship by contextualizing the lived experiences of communities of women and feminine models of collaboration and care. In the global context of doing business under the realities of increasingly common natural disasters, this work reimagines feminine leadership and ways of organizing as the superior alternative model to dominant masculine approaches based upon individualism, hyper-competition, and zero-sum game thinking.