For Maggi Thorne, resilience isn’t just a message she shares with audiences. It’s the thread that runs through nearly every chapter of her life. 

Growing up in San Diego, Thorne had a childhood shaped by financial hardship and instability at home.

Today, many of the protections and social programs that support children and families across the United States feel like a normal part of public life. But a century ago, many of those systems did not yet exist. 

One of the people who helped change that was Grace Abbott. 

Today, thousands of visitors walk through the doors of the Joslyn Art Museum, one of Omaha’s most important cultural institutions. But behind the museum’s creation was a woman whose generosity and vision helped shape the city and the community around her. 

Sarah Joslyn believed that art and culture should belong to everyone.

 Anna Wilson built her fortune in Omaha’s Sporting District, then quietly redirected it toward the city’s most vulnerable. By the 1870s, Wilson was living on Douglas Street, first listed in the federal census as “keeping house,” though she was working in gambling houses connected to her partner, Dan Allen, a well-known gambler and saloon keeper.

In 1889, inside Omaha’s Grand Opera House, Comfort Baker stood before a crowd of graduates and delivered an original essay titled “One More Plea for the Negro.” The applause, according to reports, came in waves.

When Megan Hunt was elected to the Nebraska Legislature in 2018, she did more than win a seat. She made history.

Born May 9, 1986, Hunt became the first openly LGBTQ person elected to the Nebraska Legislature and the first woman to represent District 8, which includes Omaha neighborhoods such as Dundee, Benson and Keystone.

When Magdalena Garcia was 9 years old, she moved from Mexico City to Omaha, carrying with her a deep love of art shaped by her grandmother and aunt. Every summer, she returned to Mexico City, where museums, ballet and opera were part of everyday life.

Before downtown Omaha became a destination for contemporary art, Ree Kaneko saw possibility in the vacant warehouses of the Old Market district.

Born and raised in Omaha’s Little Italy neighborhood, an immigrant community near the Old Market, Kaneko grew up close to the area that would later shape her work.

In 1976, Edwina Justus climbed into the cab of a Union Pacific locomotive and became one of the first Black women in the United States to work as a locomotive engineer.

Justus was born July 11, 1943, in Omaha to Lee and Caldonia Isaiah Chaney. As a child, she became the first Black student to enroll at Brown Park Elementary School in Omaha.

In Omaha, she was simply known as Mrs. B. But Rose Blumkin’s story is anything but simple.

Born Rose Gorelick in 1893 in what was then the Russian Empire, she was one of eight children. Her father (Solomon Gorelick) was a rabbi, and her mother (Chasia Gorelick) ran a grocery store. At 13, Rose went to work in a dry-goods store to help the family. At 16, she was the manager with 6 employees working for her.

When Dr. Cheryl Logan walked past the portraits of past superintendents at Omaha Public Schools, she felt the weight of history. Since the district’s founding in 1859, none of the faces on that wall looked like hers. That changed when she became the first Black superintendent and the first woman to lead OPS.

For Camellia “Cammy” Watkins, the work of equity is not abstract. It is personal. It is local. And it is urgent.

An Omaha native and graduate of Omaha South High School, Watkins has long felt called to service. She has spent nearly 20 years in the nonprofit sector, with work spanning affordable housing, performing arts administration, and community-focused programming.

On the Omaha Reservation in the late 19th century, access to medical care was often a matter of life or death. As a child, Susan La Flesche witnessed a Native woman die after a white doctor refused to treat her. The injustice of that moment stayed with her. It became her calling.

In Omaha, Rachel Jacobson’s name is closely tied to the spaces where community gathers, stories unfold, and civic life expands.

An Omaha native, Jacobson founded Film Streams in 2005 with a clear conviction: film is not just entertainment, it is art.

Before the prairie was romanticized in American literature, Willa Cather wrote it as she knew it. Wide. Wind-swept. Honest.

She would go on to write enduring novels of the Great Plains, including “O Pioneers!,”“The Song of the Lark” and “My Ántonia.” Her work and widely acclaimed masterpiece explored immigration, exile, nostalgia, and the intimate relationship between people and place.

Before she was breaking down national headlines on cable news, Symone Sanders Townsend was a North Omaha kid with a dream of having her own show.

Every March, when Women’s History Month arrives, I find myself asking a deeper question than simply who do we celebrate?

I ask: Whose stories built the ground we’re standing on?

So this Women’s History Month, I’m honoring Nebraska women not just with posts or quotes, but with storytelling that feels worthy of their impact.

Preston Love Jr. is a pioneering activist, journalist, and political strategist, whose work shaped conversations about race, policy, and civic leadership in Nebraska and beyond. Born in the early 1940s in Omaha to Betty and Preston Love, he grew up in a city with a rich African American community and a history of activism.

Terence Allan “Bud” Crawford (born September 28, 1987) is a retired undefeated professional boxer and one of Omaha’s most celebrated athletes. Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, Crawford grew up as the only son of Debbie and Terence Sr., navigating a challenging environment marked by poverty and crime.

Sen. Ashlei Spivey is an Omaha-born, North Omaha-raised leader whose work spans community organizing, nonprofit leadership, and public policy. Spivey has called Legislative District 13 her home her entire life, growing up in the very community she now represents in the Nebraska Legislature.