Anna Elizabeth Gorman
Anna Beth Gorman is a force of nature, especially when it comes to improving women’s lives in Arkansas. She gained self-confidence and purpose in the Girl Scouts. She also learned the importance of leaving things better than you found them.
Anna Beth Gorman stood in her high school principal’s office with a stance that said she wasn’t going anywhere until she was heard. Known for her unshakable drive to succeed, she had heard about Texas Bluebonnet Girls State, a summer gathering of teenage leaders and achievers, to which one representative per school was nominated.
“I said, ‘If you don’t send me to Girls State, you have sent the wrong representative,’” Gorman relays with a chuckle. “You can send a lot of people, and I don’t know what your recipe is for who you pick to send, but I’m just telling you I am the person that you want to send from this school.’ He’s like, ‘OK, Anna Beth, leave the office.’”
Gorman received the nomination, attended Girls State, and today calls it one of the most transformative experiences of her formative years. The story is a telling crystallization of the ethos of Gorman’s life: though not without setback and disappointment, hers is a study in harnessing obstacles to the yoke of determination, something with which to pull through and persevere.
“There’s always a way to do something you think is hard,” she says. “It’s about how you are going to achieve this thing or get to this thing that counts.”
As chief executive officer of Women’s Foundation of Arkansas, a post she has held since 2016, Gorman has revived an organization from foundering to new prominence by shoring up its finances, refocusing its purpose and filling the space in-between with support for and awareness of issues facing women and girls in the Natural State.
“We’ve done a lot of interesting things,” she says. “I feel like our job now is to make the business case for women. Our state will only be as successful as the majority of people, and the majority [in Arkansas] are women and their children. A woman’s circumstance is our circumstance for the next generation of Arkansans.”
“I think what makes her good at what she does she believes so passionately in what she’s doing,” says her husband, Colin Gorman. “It’s not a job to her. I think more than a career, it’s a passion of hers, part of her life’s work.”
The organization, and her position in it, feed Anna Beth Gorman’s social crusader and problem-solver tendencies, qualities she developed early in life. At age 10, she came home from summer camp to discover her parents were divorcing and her two older brothers were going to live with their father, leaving her mom and her to face a much different reality than just a couple of weeks before.
“I watched my mom struggle financially and I just innately knew my future depended on figuring things out myself,” she says. “I had to start taking care of myself. I went from having someone pick me up from school or
drop me off to getting myself to school, getting myself on the bus to get home, all of those things.”
The incident advanced Gorman’s education in several ways from showing her a previously unknown reality to increasing her drive to succeed in the classroom and extracurricular activities.
“I was never the smartest person in the room but I was a hard worker,” she says. “The expectation was I would be a high achiever and I was like, ‘OK, I just have to work harder to do it.’ I was in all honors programs, I was president of the student council, all that. I wasn’t just doing it to please my parents, this was my road map.”
BE PREPARED
A major influence was Girl Scouts, an activity that invested her with self-confidence and purpose.
“[Girl Scouts] was a constant in my life,” she says. “It didn’t change like my houses changed. It didn’t change like friends change. It was a program that was there for me with a message that was always positive, a message that you don’t have to dress like everybody else and you don’t have to have all these things. It comes down to helping your community; that’s what we’re here for.
“I would say out of all the noise I heard as a kid, it was the only program telling me I could be whatever I wanted to be, that I could make a difference. That was a message I needed to hear; that I mattered and the world needed people like me.”
Gorman’s self-reliant streak was developed enough at graduation to take her cross-country to Hollins University in Virginia. Despite having a radically different background from many classmates, she found her place there.
“I did not have supreme confidence. Honestly, I felt like a fish out of water,” she says. “A lot of the women had gone to private schools, had educations I would have loved to have had. It was more of a challenge to myself, like, I can do this. I can put myself in a place where I don’t know anybody and carve my own path.”
What she may have lacked in old money and classical education, Gorman made up for with gumption and a well-focused view of reality, both of which helped her overcome any feelings of inadequacy.
FINDING HER PASSION
Gorman returned to her native Texas after college without a clear idea of her next step. She headed to Austin, landing a job in state government with the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs. She learned many things in the role, namely, that a career in government wasn’t her thing.
“I felt the inequity of who’s popular, who’s not popular, who was taken seriously and who wasn’t,” she says. “I saw the public come in and testify, then saw the lobbyists behind the scenes working the deals. That didn’t motivate me to make things better. I just saw myself as a cog in this machine.”
Gorman confided her feelings to a friend and the two started discussing their true passions in life, from which came a professional shift that would change everything.
“I was like, ‘I just really loved being a Girl Scout.’ He’s like, ‘Do they hire people?’” she says. “A light bulb went on: Well, they must hire people because when I was a Girl Scout, I remember going to the Girl Scout office all the time. They couldn’t get rid of me.”
As luck would have it, the local council was hiring and a reinvigorated Gorman left nothing to chance, supplementing her application with references from former Scout leaders in Texas and Arkansas, as well as detailing her Gold Award project from high school, the fact she attended college on a Girl Scout scholarship and that she’d spent time volunteering with the local council’s activities in Virginia. By the time she showed up for the interview, her reputation had preceded her.
“I walked into the office and was greeted by the CEO,” she says. “She’s like, ‘I wanted to come out and meet you because the phone has been ringing for two days from my peers up in Arkansas saying you’re the best damn Girl Scout I would ever meet.’”
PROFESSIONAL SCOUT
Landing the job sent her to east Austin, where volunteers were scarce, where she was assigned to take girls out of class for Girl Scouts activities. Her interactions taught her the challenges the kids faced, things that were having a detrimental effect on their development.
“I would go to certain schools over the lunch period, taking them pizza, and I noticed the kids were coming mainly for the pizza because a lot of these schools were low-income, free/reduced lunches,” she says. “This wasn’t the program I had growing up where I had the same troop leader from first grade to my junior year of high school who made freshbaked cookies for us every single meeting. These kids were hungry.
“I went back to my director and said, ‘Do I have to buy pizza or could I buy food according to one of our healthy habits badges?’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I rewrote the curriculum for all my schools and brought different things. Everyone was like, ‘But why?’ I was like, ‘Because that’s what we should be doing.’”
Despite the satisfaction she felt — and the fact she was soon promoted to recruit volunteers throughout suburban Austin — Gorman made an ill-advised decision to return to the statehouse. By the time she realized her mistake, the council in Austin wasn’t hiring and she began to ponder graduate school. That’s when she got a call from Girl Scouts of Arkansas with an intriguing offer to manage local recruitment in the wake of a massive consolidation of councils. Gorman jumped at the chance but it didn’t take long to realize what she was up against.
WILD, WILD WEST
“It was the wild, wild west of Girl Scouting,” she says. “It had been five organizations that did not want to merge who were now one organization. Everybody had to reapply for their jobs except for me who’d just walked in. I’m like, ‘Hi! I’m Anna Beth. I love Girl Scouts!’ They’re like, ‘Who are you, Girl Scout Barbie?’”
Over her career, Gorman held a succession of jobs in the organization, culminating with chief officer. Despite her success, she started to feel the tug to do something different, not only for her benefit but for the organization she loved.
“It’s not good to be in an organization for so long that you have blinders on,” she says. “It’s also not good to be a product of something you’re so passionate about you cannot separate your emotional feelings about the organization. As we say in our world, ‘You can love an organization to death.’”
Her transition to Women’s Foundation of Arkansas started when she met her predecessor at a Junior League of Little Rock function and, upon learning the woman was retiring, reached out. The call turned into an interview during which she was given straight talk about the state of the organization.
“They said something like, ‘The organization isn’t doing so great. We’re at a stage where we’re even worried about being in operation within six months,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘OK, well, I think this is a great organization and I wish you guys the best. Good luck with that.’”
Despite the gloomy assessment, a seed had been planted so Gorman called back and asked for more detailed information, offering to make suggestions. The board met with her, laid its cards on the table and asked her opinion.
“I went home to my secret weapon, my husband, who’s a CPA,” she says. “He helped me work up a pro forma of what it could look like if certain things changed. I went back to them like, ‘I’m not going to lie: It’s bad. But it’s not going to sink if you do X, Y and Z. If you do, I think it could really turn itself around.’
“Some months go by and they said ‘Would you want to come fix it?’ I thought, I love being an advocate. I love to solve problems. Why not? They were like, ‘Great. We can pay you for two months and then we don’t know what we’ll do.’”
Gorman made the most of the opportunity. By the end of that year, she’d orchestrated a small reserve and hired a second staff member. Since then she has built the staff to six, produced three research reports and reinstated the Women’s Commission, a research entity, after a 50-year absence.
“I think she has a gift, a gift of communicating in a way that people hear and can relate to,” says Judge TjuanaByrd Manning, one of the board members who hired her. “She’s able to bring human values to what the WFA does so it’s not just another organization trying to raise money. She communicates the work in ways that are tangible for people to appreciate and want to engage and want to participate. She’s amazing.”
This year alone, Women’s Foundation of Arkansas raised $2 million which Gorman sees less as numbers on a page and more as an endorsement of the group’s mission in this, its 25th year in operation, even as the organization continues to evolve.
FAILING UP
Like anyone else, Gorman had her share of defeats, the most conspicuous being an unsuccessful run for Arkansas secretary of state in 2022. Yet even this she views positively, knowing the instructive value of all things ventured.
“I believe everyone should fail up,” she says. “I knew going in that I was running in a red state against an incumbent with a long history in state government representing a party that had never heard of me. I wanted people to see that if we don’t have people who want to be advocates for real problems in our state, we’re never going to solve them. Other people needed to see that example, especially women.
“We also got some things changed because I talked about them all the time during the campaign. So, I love that ‘failure.’”
As for the future of Women’s Foundation of Arkansas, Gorman’s fearlessness is intact. She’s eyeing a capital campaign and rallied a new donor base of 100 women, supporters she’s nicknamed “disruptors.” It’s a term she feels embodies the organization’s mentality perfectly.
“When I think of that word, I think of disruption for good, something we all want to see,” she says. “No one complains about the Americans with Disabilities Act anymore, but that was a disruption of a system where people were denied access to buildings. When I think of disruption with this organization, it’s about looking at problems and going on a journey to learn about the challenges that exist and seeing where we can actually move the needle in our state.
“The reality is if you look at any national list about something concerning women, Arkansas is going to fall at the bottom of it. It’s time for a little disruption in Arkansas, because we want our state to be known for good things not bad things. The work isn’t done, but I feel really good about where WFA is and where it’s going. Again, this is a Girl Scout thing: You leave things better than you found them.”