Rachel Woodhouse celebrated one year in the role of executive director at Young Women’s Resource Center on Nov. 1, but her time with the organization began much earlier. 

Woodhouse began volunteering at YWRC in 2012 shortly after graduating from college when she was trying to figure out how she wanted to begin her career. 

“Feminism and women-supporting organizations have always just been a part of my identity, and so when I started volunteering, I was just looking for places that aligned with my personal interests,” Woodhouse said. 

She’s since supported many aspects of the nonprofit. She began as a founding member of the YWRC’s young professionals board, provided child care, served meals and supported fundraising efforts. She built a career in philanthropy, working for organizations such as Des Moines Performing Arts, Bravo Greater Des Moines and the Principal Foundation. 

Woodhouse became the interim executive director in July 2024, succeeding Kari Zimmerman, and took over the role officially in November. 

She now leads the organization as they serve young women, ages 10-24, in Greater Des Moines, empowering participants “to be strong, self-confident and resilient.” 

“The heart of our programs is meeting essential needs, minimizing barriers to participating in our programs and helping participants be socially, emotionally, physically and financially well so that when they are 18, they not only have the ability to live independently successfully, but also they understand what their choices are in life,” she said. 

Woodhouse sat down with the Business Record to discuss her love for philanthropy, Des Moines and empowering women. 

This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

What inspired you to pursue a career in philanthropy? 

I knew some people who worked at Des Moines Performing Arts, and I just kind of made that my single-minded objective to get a job there. The first time I actually applied for a role on the development team, I didn’t get the job. I started working part time in the ticket office and focusing on my community engagement. That’s when I was a member of the YWRC young professionals group and the Art Noir board. I was an active P.E.O. sister in my chapter. When that development position at DMPA reopened a couple years after I’d initially been declined, I’d seen what supporting your community looks like and what positive change it can effectuate. Also seeing how astounding an asset a place like DMPA is in our region economically, artistically, all of the things, it was really easy to say, ‘I believe in this mission to a degree that I think I can help influence good outcomes for the organization.’ That kickstarted it. It was realizing that philanthropy was a tool to see the things I wanted our community to see. I wanted to experience different sides of the fundraising table so that kept me in philanthropy and the grant-making world. 

What about YWRC’s mission is fulfilling to you? 

The way that I describe our work is that we have three main program areas and several free services that we offer to girls and women ages 10 to 24. We help our girls understand that they get to make choices for whatever is best for them and their families and that they don’t think that there’s a limit to what they can do or accomplish or achieve for themselves. For me, it’s really important that women see that. Everything we do, from a mission standpoint, is critical to me. I remember even in high school, before I knew about the YWRC, thinking about services or programs I thought myself, my friends or my counterparts deserved to help them be able to live independently. The mission is personal but also critical to everything we do. 

We have three swaths of programming: counseling and mental health, empowerment programming and work with young moms. We get to serve all these young women who have different backgrounds, needs, stages and resources through community partners, referrals and word of mouth. It’s not true across the board, but many of the young women we work with are in a space where they have some type of barrier to resources that we can mitigate. 

What challenges does YWRC help young women face? 

Our empowerment programming, for fifth through 12th grade, is in schools, after-school, summer groups and we have some groups during spring breaks. We get referrals for all types of reasons: A girl might be experiencing bullying; a drop in her academic performance; isolation; or some type of trauma in her life. It could be just that her confidence is low. When we bring these girls together, they are learning skills and having experiences that expose them to different things. We have programs where students learn about health and nutrition or age-appropriate reproductive health care topics. They learn about resilience. They also learn skills like collaboration, effective communication, boundary setting and enforcing. We have exposure to technical, school and work pieces, but we also want to build them as individuals, to feel confident and to be able to be out in the world with other people. 

We provide a number of interventions and classes for young moms so they have parenting life skills. They have childbirth education, an infant feeding support group, free doula intervention. When you are a mom who has not yet finished high school, the likelihood of you completing high school goes from about 50% to around 92% if you have this doula intervention. We also offer a higher education scholarship program for our young moms. In the best of circumstances, it is a really difficult thing to become a parent, especially a mother. So when you are dealing with, ‘What if my family doesn’t have enough money to support me, what if I don’t have food to feed my baby?’ That is such a mental place of fear and uncertainty. Even building the confidence on those skills is a huge piece of it. 

What challenges is YWRC facing today? 

There are the challenges that all nonprofits are now facing, the dynamic policy changes and the fact that those changes impact either our businesses or our participants. It brings its own sort of nuanced challenges, depending on who’s getting hit by what. We’re also facing a drastic change in the landscape of how funders are funding. I spoke with a funder today who saw a 30% increase in applications in one year. The resources are finite. At the end of the day, we have to solve the sustainability piece of funding for the sector. 

For us specifically, a global challenge is making sure that we are a more known entity within the community. We’ve been around for nearly 50 years, and we’ve done a fantastic job of managing our resources, but the challenge we have to overcome is that we have not stated our value position to the community for folks to understand we are making a real impact with girls. The more investment we get, the more impact we can create. At the end of the day, overall health, social health, financial health, everything for the women of your community is a pretty big indicator of the overall health and sustainability of your entire community. 

Tell me about a woman that positively impacted you as a young person. 

Professionally, two women who are, hands down, some of the most significant mentors of my life, are Tiffany K. Spinner, who is now at ChildServe, and Sally Dix at Bravo. They both intentionally and passively taught me things that, to this day, I still use, like really good decision-making tools or resiliency tools. Education-wise, Vicki Goldsmith was my women’s studies teacher at Roosevelt. I am a lifelong feminist but I didn’t really think about it as an academic discipline until I took her course. She’s incredible, and she was personal friends with our founder Louise Noun. From a personal side, I come from a long line of what I consider very amazing women. My mom is a scientist who is also a major tomboy. If you’re going to be her kid, you have to be confident. I had a grandmother who graduated from the University of Iowa in the 1920s and was a teacher before she was married. She lived many, many years past her husband dying, and was a very solid woman. Then my other grandmother, who’s still alive, was independent from the time she was 19. She knew she didn’t want to stay on the farm, and she worked her entire adult life while many of her peers in the ’60s were parenting and not working outside of the home. She was like, ‘No, that’s not what I want for myself.’ The combination of those three ways of being completely your own woman and a strong woman I think makes me feel very confident that I can be my own brand of woman and strong at the same time. 

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At a glance

Hometown: Des Moines

Family: Daughter Irene, 10; co-parent, Matt; and partner, Randy. 

Education: Bachelor’s degree in liberal studies with a minor in women’s studies from Iowa State University 

Activities: Literacy advocacy and reading, movies and serving on the Des Moines Film Board, spending time with friends. 

Contact: rwoodhouse@ywrc.org