Sherri North grew up on a farm in rural Southeast Missouri, in a world where women’s voices were often the last ones to be heard. She navigated systems that were built to constrain rather than empower, in a patriarchal environment that had little room for the kind of ambition living quietly inside her.

Then, something shifted.

She found her voice. And once she did, everything that had always been inside her finally had somewhere to go, and she felt a purpose that she could not ignore.

That journey led her through a career as a communication specialist, through leadership roles in various industries, onto stages at national conferences and international symposiums, and into a doctoral program at Pepperdine University where she now studies Global Leadership and Change, empathetic leadership, rural uplift, and what it takes to build human systems that actually work.

She Makes Policy is the organization Sherri wished had existed when she was a girl on the farm. It is built on the belief that rural communities are not a deficit to be overcome. Instead, they are a wellspring of untapped leadership, wisdom, and power.

She just needed someone to tell her that. Now, she is that someone for every woman and girl who needs to hear it too.