Natalie Madeira Cofield
Keynote Speaker
Office of Women's Business Ownership,
Assistant Administrator
Natalie Cofield has been selected to serve as the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Women's Business Ownership, at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) where she serves as a senior executive providing executive oversight, management, leadership, and championship of female entrepreneurship. In her role Natalie oversees the largest expansion of the Women's Business Center (WBC) network in the history of the SBA across its nearly 140 center footprint and more than $70 million in federal grant-making to support the growth of women-led firms.
Natalie is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with over 15 years of experience in securing diverse capital, building strategic partnerships, and leading state and local economic development policy advocacy to successfully incubate and scale small business development and expansion initiatives in communities throughout the United States. She brings extensive experience leading business and trade associations and working with corporations, and philanthropic organizations to develop programs to support entrepreneurship within women-led, diverse and urban communities and is responsible for securing over $22 million in capital to invest in entrepreneurial ventures and small business programs and initiatives. Most recently she served as Founder & CEO of Walker's Legacy and the Walker's Legacy Foundation providing entrepreneurship programming to support thousands of multicultural women entrepreneurs.
An accomplished advocate for women, Natalie was named by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Business in 2019 and selected among 137 cover-story business leaders and entrepreneurs from across the nation for her response to COVID-19 in the magazine’s most recent Entrepreneur Magazine July/August 2020 edition cover.
She is a graduate of Howard University where she received her BBA in Information Systems and the Baruch School of Public Affairs where she was a National Urban Fellow. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.