Twenty Years in One Room
The YWCA’s Empowering Women Luncheon celebrates its 20th anniversary this October. Here is what two decades of one-hour lunches have created.
At noon on a Wednesday in early October, over a thousand people sit down to lunch at the Joseph A. Floreano Rochester Riverside Convention Center. They eat quickly. Someone welcomes them. Someone inspiring speaks. Ninety minutes later they go back to work.
It may not sound like much, but it has funded a great deal of important work.
This October 7 marks the 20th Empowering Women Luncheon. It’s the 20th time the YWCA of Rochester & Monroe County has asked this community to give up a Wednesday lunch hour on behalf of women and families who need somewhere safe to sleep. This year, Venus Williams will be the guest, and the theme is Serving Strength, Building Futures.
Before that room fills again, it is worth examining the purpose of the luncheon, how it came to be, and what it has become.
What does one lunch hour pay for?
The luncheon is not a gala. There is no auction, no black tie, no evening childcare problem for the people who attend. That is deliberate, and it is part of why it works. A midday event, in the middle of a work week, is an event most working people in Rochester can actually attend.
The luncheon is a fundraiser. The money it raises supports the work that the YWCA does every day. Work that, frankly, does not photograph well. Work that isn’t particularly exciting or sexy, either. It's work that is, instead, essential. Necessary. Fundamental.
It pays for Emergency Housing.
YWCA’s Emergency Housing serves more than 600 women and children in crisis each year, offering private and safe rooms, individual case management, on-site medical and mental health screenings, drop-in childcare, and up to one year of follow-up support after a resident leaves. Persimmon Place, which opened in November 2025, added 12 family units, nearly tripling the organization’s capacity to keep a mother and her children together under one roof when they desperately need it.
It pays for Long-Term Housing.
YWCA’s Long-term housing programs provide a wide and growing array of supportive and subsidized housing, with over 130 stable units available to women and families who have experienced homelessness. These include 47 single rooms for women, many of whom are aging in place, as well as 24 new apartments that opened just a few weeks ago, where families can find and build community.
It pays for Rapid Re-Housing and Addiction Recovery.
YWCA’s rapid rehousing programs provides support for approximately two-dozen women-led households as they flee domestic violence. Case workers assist with securing safe housing, provide rental subsidies, and offer wrap-around support for up to two years as they get back on their feet, and work to achieve a steady income and upward mobility. Through the Steppingstone program, YWCA provides substance abuse treatment for up to 29 women as they transition out of rehabilitation, supporting them with a safe place to stay as they adapt to sober living.
It pays for Person-Centered Care.
YWCA’s case managers across all housing programs provide one-on-one support to every single woman and their families who stay in our residences. This isn’t just about housing. It’s about serving the whole woman and her needs, whether it’s accomplishing her goals, connecting with benefits, gaining employment, accessing healthcare, participating in wellness activities and — most importantly — creating a sense of real community.
So what does a Wednesday afternoon in the fall, with more than a thousand-plus Rochester community members, and one lunch hour pay for?
It funds the work YWCA does everyday!
Most of them look like a Tuesday in February. When nobody is watching. When there’s nothing to photograph. When a woman knocks on the door of Persimmon Place at 11:40 p.m. with two children and all their worldly possessions in a garbage bag. When a caseworker sits down with them, assures them they are safe, and assigns them a room; one with heat and beds with sheets. Those are the days and the work the luncheon pays for, and the reason for its existence.
Empowering Women Luncheon Speakers – 2007 to Present Day
2007 Dr. Mae Jemison, physician, engineer, and the first Black woman to travel in space
2008 Liz Murray, author of Breaking Night, homeless as a teenager in the Bronx and later a student at Harvard
2009 Ursula Burns, chief executive of Xerox and the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company
2010 Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle
2011 Victoria Rowell, actress and author, raised in foster care
2012 Kathy LeMay, founder of Raising Change
2013 Susan L. Taylor, editor-in-chief emerita of Essence and founder of the National CARES Mentoring Movement
2014 Elizabeth Smart, child safety advocate and author
2015 Lucille O’Neal, author and the incredible mother of basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal.
2016 Beverly Gooden, victims’ rights advocate and creator of #WhyIStayed
2017 Sonia Manzano, actress, writer, and speaker best known for playing Maria on Sesame Street
2018 Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest member of the Little Rock Nine
2019 Janine Latus, author, who lost her sister to domestic violence in 2002
2020 Cancelled due to Covid-19. Dr. Myra Henry re-envisioned the luncheon as a call to action opportunity
2021 During Covid, the City of Rochester lit the town orange for the month of October in support of the YWCA and our Empowering Women Sponsorship campaign.
2022 Ilyasah Shabazz, author, community organizer, social activist, and motivational speaker. She is the third daughter of Malcolm X
2023 Erin Gruwell, founder of Freedom Writers Foundation
2024 Nicole Lynn, president of football operations at Klutch Sports Group
2025 MC Lyte, rapper, actor, and entrepreneur
2026 Venus Williams, tennis champion, entrepreneur, author, and advocate.
The luncheon paused in 2020 and 2021. The need did not. Emergency Housing stayed open through both years and case managers kept working. With no room to gather in, the City of Rochester lit the town orange for the month of October in support of the YWCA. The lunch stopped for two years. Nothing else did.
Changing speakers, core tenets
Read through quickly and it looks like a run of famous names. Read more slowly, and fame is not the through-line at all. Many are not professional motivational speakers – though maybe they could be.
No — these guests are women who did something difficult in the public eye and are willing to answer the question plainly: how did it go? More than that, the speaking invitations track the YWCA’s own program areas with more discipline than most event calendars manage. Twenty years of choices and the same handful of subjects keep returning.
Housing and homelessness.
Liz Murray in 2008 and Jeannette Walls in 2010 both wrote about childhoods spent without a stable address, years before either topic was fashionable on a stage. That is what Emergency Housing addresses every night of the year.
Foster care and youth. Victoria Rowell in 2011, who grew up in the system she went on to write about. We are building housing for people aging out of the foster care system.
Violence against women and survivor safety. Elizabeth Smart in 2014, Beverly Gooden in 2016, Janine Latus in 2019. Gooden created #WhyIStayed after leaving an abusive marriage and gave a generation of women language for a question they were tired of being asked. Latus lost her sister to domestic violence in 2002 and has spoken about it ever since.
Breaking into rooms that were not built for them. Mae Jemison, the first Black woman to travel in space. Ursula Burns, invited in 2009, the same year she became the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company, at a company this city knows by name. Susan L. Taylor of Essence. Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest of the Little Rock Nine. Trailblazers Nicole Lynn, MC Lyte, and this year Venus Williams.
Education, movement building, and philanthropy. Kathy LeMay in 2012. Lucille O’Neal in 2015. Sonia Manzano in 2017. Ilyasah Shabazz in 2022, the centennial year of the Clarissa Street Branch. Erin Gruwell in 2023, when the YWCA Rochester & Monroe County marked its 140th anniversary serving women in this community.
Those are not categories a committee assembled from a list of available celebrities. They are the organization’s own service lines, cast as people. A woman who has lived through the thing the YWCA exists to address stands up and describes it, and a thousand people who fund that work hear it in her own venerable voice. That is the whole design, and it has held for twenty years. It is durable and enduring, just like the YWCA.
What has not changed?
YWCA of Rochester & Monroe County was founded in 1883 by eleven women. It has been here through suffrage, two world wars, the Depression, urban renewal, recessions, a pandemic, and the slow grinding arrival of a housing crisis that has not let up.
The luncheon is 20 years old, hosted by an organization that is 143 years old. That proportion matters. The event is not the mission. It is a once-a-year mechanism for funding the mission’s work, and its longevity is due to the people in the room who keep deciding the mission is worth lunch on a Wednesday afternoon in October.
JOIN US
Empowering Women Luncheon
When: Wednesday, October 7 at noon
Where: Joseph A. Floreano Rochester Riverside Convention Center
Who: Venus Williams and your closest 1500 friends
Come for Venus. Stay engaged for the work and the mission.
Tables and individual seats are available now – reserve yours today at ywcarochester.org/empowering-women-luncheon
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