Natalie Cofield

An award-winning entrepreneur, philanthropist, political appointee, and economic activist, Natalie Cofield has provided some of the nation's most prominent CEOs of billion-dollar organizations, executives of global brands, senior advisors to the White House, mayors of leading national cities, and community activists and leaders with inspiration, insight and advisement.

Her efforts have been responsible for supporting the deployment of more than $200 million in funding to eco-systems and entrepreneurs throughout the country. As a presidentially-appointed Assistant Administrator for the U.S. Small Business Administration, she advised on the deployment of $1.2 trillion in funding and was directly responsible for architecting programs that distributed $200 million in funding to ecosystems throughout the country during the greatest economic crisis in modern history.

As the former head of the Office of Women’s Business Ownership at the U.S. Small Business Administration, she funded the largest expansion of the Women’s Business Center network in the history of SBA, with a total of 146 centers located in every state in the US, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Cofield is the founder and former CEO of Walker's Legacy, the most prestigious digital platform to empower women through entrepreneurship, and its adjoined nonprofit arm, the Walker's Legacy Foundation, where sheestablished a $25,000 funded scholarship for enterprising women at her alma mater, Howard University.

In 2019, Cofield was named the inaugural Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the District of Columbia leading Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 202Creates Program providing entrepreneurship advice to creative economy businesses within the District of Columbia.

An honors tech graduate (where she was mentored by CIOs of two of America's leading Fortune 500 companies) Cofield leveraged her coding experience to build a career centered on empowering businesses, entrepreneurs, women and underrepresented communities.

Her work has been featured on and by Inc, Time, CNN, NYTimes, Fast Company, Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Black Enterprise, Essence, and EBONY, among others.

She was named a Champion of Small Business by the Association of Enterprising Opportunity, was selected among 137 cover-story business leaders and entrepreneurs from across the nation for her response to COVID-19 where she graced Entrepreneur Magazine’s July/August 2020 edition cover. She has also been named as one of the 100 Most Powerful Washingtonians by the Washington Business Journal.