“What determines the outcome is not willpower, but whether people have support, language, and community when the ground shifts.”
Stephanie Swanson, Founder & CEO
The Empower Network began the year Stephanie’s body stopped keeping the promises it used to keep.
In early 2025, Stephanie sent a message to our first advisor panel:
“What do you think about the name The Empower Network for the non-profit?”
From the beginning, we knew we weren’t just forming an organization, we were building the foundations of a community.
The Empower Network grew out of a tight-knit group of athletes learning how to live in the face of disabling chronic illness - people who had spent years training themselves to endure pain, to push past limits, and to trust that effort would be rewarded with growth and recovery.
But together, we were confronting a brutal reality:
When you push through disabling conditions as if your body still has the recovery mechanisms of an able-bodied one, decline often comes faster.
Stephanie experienced this firsthand after developing Long Covid in 2022.
Her life was full and fast-moving: raising three children, leading complex systems work in an academic medical center, and still training and performing as an aerialist in the evenings.
Then, almost overnight, that life was stripped away by a simple viral infection with no answers, treatments, or cure. Over the next three years, she slowly adjusted, modifying life to fit an entirely new set of demands while facing one of the biggest questions of life:
“Who am I when I can no longer do what once defined me?”
Disability is not a rare experience reserved for the unlucky few.
Most of us will eventually face the limits of our physical or mental capacity through illness, injury, or age.
And the problem is not simply the loss of capacity, independence, or competence.
It’s that our workplaces, our expectations, and our definitions of value and productivity are all built on the assumption that our capabilities define our worth, and that those capabilities will always grow with the right time, effort, and practice.
What began as conversations among sidelined athletes trying to find their way back into meaningful professional life quickly revealed something larger.
The questions we were asking were’nt really about returning to who we were before - they were about how to move forward when the old rules no longer applied:
How do you redefine your identity when you no longer fit into the boxes society provides?
How do you stay connected to meaningful work when your capacity is inconsistent?
How do you rebuild a sense of self when productivity can no longer serve as its foundation?
This quickly gained traction, spreading beyond the chronic illness community into the disability and neurodivergent communities.
The challenge was never individual resilience.
The challenge is fitting into systems that reward work without rest, machine-like productivity, and constant availability. Systems that aren’t designed to accommodate the reality of human limitations.
The Empower Network grew from a community struggling to find their way. It has become a space for people navigating chronic illness, disability, and neurodivergence to rethink work, pursue financial independence, and build lives that reflect the realities of changing capacity rather than denying them.
Not to mirror the able-bodied world from which we came.
But as a way forward, embracing the very limitations that opened our eyes to a new way of living.
The Empower Network has several ways to get involved:
Join Our Community
Access a peer-led space where ambition meets sustainability. Join as a member for free, and contribute what you can when you have the resources.
Upcoming Events
From disability-informed business webinars to virtual co-working, find the support you need to grow at your own pace.
Volunteer for TEN
Help us build a more accessible future for chronically sick, disabled and neurodivergent entrepreneurs. Your donations directly fund our programs and resources.