Welcome to DollarDiva World!

Download sample DollarDiva Newsletter.

In 1990 Independent Means founder, Joline Godfrey, a social worker from Maine, turned corporate woman and entrepreneur in Boston, moved to California to write Our Wildest Dreams, a book about women entrepreneurs, their passions and their challenges. (It has been an eclectic life of surprise she says.)

By the time she'd written the last chapter of her book, she had had an epiphany: many of the stories the women told about their lives and their businesses reflected the fact that each of the women she wrote about had had both a late start in their own journey of financial independence, and too little help. By the time the book hit the shelves of book stores around the country, she had a mission: find a way to help young women get an early start on their own journey for independence.

And with that mission, the DollarDiva Story began.

In May of 1992, Joline and her friend Karen Schafer invited 50 teenage women from Ojai, CA's Nordhoff High School to meet with twenty DollarDivas to talk about money, business and independence. They had no idea how the day would turn out, or even if it would work, but decided to experiment with bringing the two groups together to see what might happen. (Exploring the unknown is a trademark of any true DollarDiva!)

The DollarDivas included people like Ruth Owades, founder of Calyx and Corolla, the first overnight mail-order flower company, Ella Williams, who had built a highly successful engineering company in southern California (she told of getting her first contract for $20 million after showing up for years to the same clients, loaf of her own home made bread in hand!), Kirby Sack, who had just started her own residential real estate firm, Terrie Williams, founder of the first public relations agency started by a Black woman, and Sonia Melara, founder of one of the country's first successful Hispanic Yellow Pages.