We’re excited to officially welcome HR-Minded Consulting Services to Lozafina. Since the beginning of this year, we’ve had the opportunity to partner with their team to develop and produce their newsletter, shaping content that reflects their expertise, speaks directly to their audience, and shows up consistently with clarity and intention. What started as a single touchpoint has quickly become a powerful extension of their brand.

Long before her name became tied to one of Omaha’s most well-known institutions, Mary Lucretia Creighton was simply known as someone who helped her neighbors. 

Born Mary Lucretia Wareham on February 3, 1834, in Dayton, Ohio, she married businessman and pioneer Edward Creighton in 1856.

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.

There are rooms you walk into knowing the conversation matters. And then there are rooms that confirm it the moment you begin.

At this year’s Ethicspace 2026, hosted by the Business Ethics Alliance, I had the opportunity to lead a workshop titled: “The Audience You Want to Reach, and the One(s) You Don’t.”

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.

Born May 11, 1896, near Hay Springs, Nebraska, Sandoz grew up in a homesteading family on the plains. Her father, Jules Ami Sandoz, was a Swiss immigrant whose life and influence would later become the subject of one of her most well-known works.

The door opened to the sound of music already playing.

Inside, the records were stacked wall to wall — soul, jazz, blues, gospel — each one part of a larger story. Customers didn’t just come to buy music. They came to listen, to talk, to stay awhile.

Leola McDonald was behind the counter.

On May 20, 2015, Kerrie Orozco went to work knowing her life was about to change. Her daughter, born three months early, was finally coming home from the hospital. Orozco had delayed her maternity leave until that moment, planning to begin it the next day. 

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.

In 2013, Jean Stothert made history as the first woman elected mayor of Omaha, breaking a long line of male leadership in the city’s top office. More than a decade later, she remains one of the longest-serving mayors in modern Omaha history.

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.