Julie Wilson’s journey from growing up in small-town Connecticut to equipping and empowering women as the president of Women Doing Well was Spirit-led every step of the way. With a passion for women in leadership, there is no doubt God has prepared and positioned Julie for this moment in time.
Julie remembers watching her mother help others, opening their home to everyone. “She loved beauty,” Julie says. “She loved decorating and being hospitable. She had so much capacity.” But she watched her father’s career flourish and her mother wither on the vine, unsure of her purpose or value to her family and community.
That’s why Julie is so passionate about helping women discover their God-designed purpose, passion, and plan today. “I don’t want any generous family or community to go without fully alive women who are able to engage and share what they have.”
A dream interrupted
Julie graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism and set her sights on a career in media. Having grown up in church, but lacking any real relationship with God, she believed Christianity was about being God’s helper. “I really felt like God could use my help to make the world a better place,” Julie says. She believed journalism would give her influence with those God was too busy to help.
So, she set off for New York City, where she would work as a page for NBC TV. Julie’s sister had heard about a really great church in the city – Redeemer Presbyterian, where Tim Keller was pastor. Julie decided to go. While there, she saw a bulletin board with information about a women’s group that would change her life. The following Monday evening, she met the woman who would lead her to Christ, Cindy Halsted.
The week Julie started her 10-month page program at NBC was the week she began a relationship with Christ for the first time.
SNL and Sunday school
Julie continued going to Redeemer and the weekly women’s Bible study. Seeing the ways God was working in the women around her opened new pathways in her mind. Instead of being focused on landing a permanent position at NBC, Julie was focused on telling others about Jesus.
“I was working at Saturday Night Live and photocopying kindergarten Sunday school materials,” Julie says. “My coworkers couldn’t believe people still taught Sunday school. It was a great conversation starter and fueled my desire to see others know Christ.”
At the end of her time at NBC, Julie took a job with Campus Crusade (Cru). She worked at Priority Associate, a ministry of Cru for young professionals, for nearly a decade in NYC, but she eventually burned out. It was early 2002. The city she loved had been radically changed by 9/11. Her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. Julie was ready to move on. She was invited to be on the national leadership team of Priority Associate and move to Florida.
Discovering purpose and passion
Soon after the move to Florida, Julie attended an event where the speaker guided attendees to discern their personal purpose and passion. Julie found hers: cultivating change and women in leadership.
Her old friend Cindy from New York was also living in Orlando and working for an organization called Generous Giving. Given Julie’s strengths, purpose, and passion, Cindy knew Julie would be perfect for the organization.
She had never heard of Generous Giving, but in the back of her mind was an article a friend had sent her while her mom was sick. In it, the columnist had said one way to honor a loved one who has passed away was to pick a quality of theirs and commit to living it out in your own life.
“I picked generosity, because my mom loved to share,” Julie says. “She would give you the shirt off her back.”
When Julie arrived for her first day at Generous Giving, she found a pile of books on her desk, with a brochure on top that read, For God so loved, he gave. “I remembered wanting to be generous to honor my mom,” Julie says, “and I thought, ‘I’ve been set up.’” It seemed too coincidental to be real.
In Julie’s first week with Generous Giving, Cindy organized a group to pray for women to understand their role in generosity. Julie felt like she was finally in a position to live out her purpose and passion.
Cultivating change through leading women
A few years into her job with Generous Giving, Janice Worth, an NCF giver and member of Julie’s prayer group, came to Julie with an opportunity to create an event centered around women and generosity based on a large body of research that had just been conducted about what motivates and inhibits women’s giving. It had always been clear to Julie that, when it came to generosity, women were different. She could never fully explain it until she saw the research.
For years, an increasing percentage of the wealth in the country has been held by women. And with the coming Great Wealth Transfer, that number is expected to triple. “Women have always been part of God’s story of showing generosity,” Julie says. “In this next season, they will be on the front lines in an even greater way.”
In 2012, a group of four women (two from the National Christian Foundation) conducted a new study and then founded a movement called Women Doing Well (WDW). They prayed for 300 respondents for their study. They got 7,300. “It’s the largest body of research in the world on women and giving,” Julie says. “And it’s very clear what motivates and prevents women’s giving.”
The study showed that while 51 percent of the wealth in the U.S. is controlled by women, only six percent of the women surveyed felt confident and equipped in their giving.
Julie remembers Janice saying, “Jules, this is going to change the world.” People had known women were poorly prepared for biblical generosity and stewardship, but they had never seen it in black and white like this before.
Armed with this knowledge, Julie, Janice, the founders, and a few friends created the first event for women aimed at equipping and empowering them in their God-designed generosity. “It was so much fun,” Julie says, “because it tapped into my purpose of cultivating change and my passion for women in leadership.”
Pathway to purpose
In 2020, just a few months before COVID shut down the world, Julie stepped away from her work with Generous Giving to lead WDW full time. “It has been a wild ride,” she says. “Knowing my purpose was the first step; using my purpose was like using dynamite to light a fire in my heart for the things of God.”
Julie had never run a nonprofit on her own before. But, in the years that followed, under her leadership, WDW has equipped and inspired thousands of women in their giving by helping the discover their purpose, passion, and plan through WDW’s Pathway experience.
“Everyone can benefit from knowing their purpose,” Julie says. “But women in this season of God’s story must have this knowledge to do the things God has for us in this Great Wealth Transfer. The stakes are too high and the impact too great for them to enter into this moment unprepared.”
Julie had grown up valuing generosity and desiring to change the world for the better. But it took God stepping into her life at crucial moments for her to finally find and live out the purpose and passion he’d instilled in her from the beginning. Now, she’s helping others do the same.
Correction: Julie Wilson is the president of Women Doing Well. The newsletter in which this story first ran incorrectly stated that Julie Wilson was a co-founder.
Photos: Julie Wilson
