Entrepreneur, Advisor, Frm. U. S. SBA Assistant Administrator
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.
Natalie 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 she established 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) Natalie 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.
An avid traveler, Cofield has visited more than 46 countries and counting.
