Melanie Bridgeforth Outlines Next Steps of a Storied and Groundbreaking Career

After leading the Women’s Foundation of Alabama to exponential growth as CEO, Melanie Bridgeforth has stepped down to launch a firm to empower changemakers. (Marika N. Johnson, For The Birmingham Times)
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By Challis Morgan | For The Birmingham Times

(Women’s History Month Special)

“I’m excited to build a company whose very premise is change,” said Melanie Bridgeforth, beaming as she described her plans to launch a consulting firm in the summer of 2025. She’s seated in a penthouse conference room of downtown Birmingham’s historic John Hand Building with light pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. But light also seemed to be pouring out of her as she discussed the next steps of her storied and groundbreaking career.

In October 2024, Bridgeforth announced her resignation from the Women’s Foundation of Alabama (WFA), where she served as president and CEO, for the past six years.

All total, Bridgeforth has spent the past 14 years of her career working as a change maker. She lobbied for smoke-free policies at the local level and fought for pulse oximetry testing to detect heart defects in newborns. As the Director of VOICES for Alabama’s Children, she helped pass a bill that addressed safety regulations in childcare centers.

In graduate school at the University of Alabama, Bridgeforth publicly declared that she wanted to “change the world.” Her professor, unfazed by Bridgeforth’s boldness, told her that policy was the way to do it.

“You have to change laws,” Bridgeforth remembers her teacher saying. “You have to change the very things that people cannot see but affect their everyday life.”

And she began to do just that.

During her tenure at WFA, Bridgeforth led the organization through a total transformation. In the 1990s, the Women’s Fund of Greater Birmingham started off as a component fund to support the social and economic well-being of women.

In 2011, it became an independent nonprofit. Bridgeforth arrived in 2018 and under her leadership it was time to turn the local machine into a statewide resource. It was an exponential endeavor.

In 2021, the Women’s Fund publicly announced a statewide expansion and rebrand, becoming the WFA. In the two years following that change, the organization went from serving five counties to 40; its revenue increased by 174 percent, according to a report released by the organization, and it brought in $9.4 million in just over a year; and it scaled its programming and doubled grant making to $1 million annually to benefit nonprofit organizations across the state.

Under Bridgeforth’s leadership, the WFA helped push through legislation aimed at making childcare more accessible. In 2019, Gov. Kay Ivey signed the Equal Pay Act, which prohibits employers from paying employees based on sex or race, making Alabama one of 48 states to pass a law addressing pay disparity.

“It’s not about working on women’s issues. It’s about winning women’s issues,” said Bridgeforth, 43.

Melanie Bridgeforth has launched her own firm to empower changemakers. (Marika N. Johnson, For The Birmingham Times)

“Strong Organizations Win”

Bridgeforth’s conviction and passion have made her successful, but her heart makes her a leader.

“I was taught that leadership is a responsibility, not a crown,” she said. “And with leadership comes great opportunity to affect the lives of people around you.”

Bridgeforth’s experience with reframing systems has allowed her to deepen her understanding of what it takes to create change. “Not the kind of short-term change that just makes you feel good,” she said in an interview when she first arrived at the WFA, “but systemic, sustainable change.”

The secret is in the system. The system is the vehicle for change.

“Strong organizations win, period,” she said plainly. “When you’re talking about movement building, you’ve gotta be organized from the bottom to the top, from side to side.”

Everyone has a role, and Bridgeforth stresses that developing the ability to sense and address gaps, direct resources, and reinforce support is critical.

“That means making sure the work you’re trying to lead is strong and well-resourced and that it has powerful, influential people behind it, supporting it, surrounding it because change is never the work of one person,” she said.

Lasting, large-scale change is the foundation upon which Bridgeforth has built her career. “Whether it’s the [WFA], my time at VOICES for Alabama’s Children, or rebuilding the Alabama Governmental Affairs Department, [I’m] making sure that the container is ready to do the work it’s been called upon to do,” she said.

Dreamers and Doers

Bridgeforth has developed a rhythm for gathering and laying the steppingstones that bring hope home, mobilizing vision by cultivating resources. But the story did not begin with her; it began five generations ago.

“I come from a long line of dreamers and doers,” she said. “As a fifth-generation Alabamian and descendant of Black people—farmers and landowners.”

George Bridgeforth was a former slave who began acquiring land in North Alabama in the 1870s. Today the family business, Darden Bridgeforth and Sons, based in Tanner, Alabama, carries the namesake of Melanie’s grandfather and has expanded to cover 9,300 acres of land about 30 miles west of Huntsville, Alabama.

Bridgeforth grew up in Athens, Alabama, under the covering of her close-knit family.

“I’m just blessed that I, for whatever reason, have the parents I have,” she said.

Her mother, Catherine, and father, John Henry, ingrained in Melanie and her brothers that legacy was part of their birthright. “To be part of my family, to be a Bridgeforth, is a spirit of grit,” Melanie said. “[My parents] taught us from a very early age the power of identity and of creating our own.”

In addition to generations of expansion, the Bridgeforth story is rooted in advocacy. In the early 1900s, George Bridgeforth’s eldest son, George Ruffin Bridgeforth, established an all-Black community of landholders known as Beulahland, now Tanner, Alabama.

The community thrived until the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), currently one of the largest power providers in the U.S., came knocking under the New Deal in the early 1930s. The Bridgeforths began petitioning the government in an effort to protect their community.

The Beulahland community and the Bridgeforth family forged ahead without support of the TVA, according to a quote from a thesis done by a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in 1990, who wrote, “In spite of the Authority’s lack of assistance, Beulahland and the Bridgeforth family continued to prosper. Their interaction with the federal government provided them with the means to confront local governmental policies which discriminated against Blacks. As a result, in the late 1930s, they increasingly turned their attention to issues such as Black voter registration and equal educational opportunities.”

Leaning Into the Call

Bridgeforth is not new to this, she’s true to this. The idea that an individual can influence America’s fortress of systems, laws, and wealth — conceived and set up to exploit and exclude all but a few — is almost inconceivable to most people and daunting at best.

Yet Bridgeforth, a Black woman, has penetrated the pockets, redrawn the boundaries, and rewritten the fine print. Her story is not about being a lobbyist or a CEO; it’s about being a conduit. Her journey carries a message: We all have a role to play. Leaning into our calling and our community is essential to collective progress.

Now Bridgeforth is breaking new ground.

“I’m building a firm that will meet values-driven change makers, corporations, not where they are but where they dream,” she said about her new endeavor while still basking in the bright light of the penthouse conference room, beaming as though she’d been asked what she wanted to be when she grew up.

Armed with nearly 15 years of experience, a heavy network and a spirit of possibility handed down by her ancestors, Melanie Bridgeforth is perfectly positioned to continue leading big change in Alabama and beyond.

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