Jill Blankenship Awarded Nellie Cashman Prize

— by Margie Doyle —

Jill Blankenship

Jill Blankenship, the 2013 winner of the Small Business Association Person of the Year award for Washington State, was the recipient of the Nellie Cashman Award earlier this month. Jill won the award from the Women Business Owners organization over a field of five other regional business entrepreneurs.

Back on Orcas to attend personally to Frontline Call Center business (she usually works one week on-island, and one week off-island), Jill spoke with Orcas Issues about the business that she founded 10 years ago.

She established Frontline Call Center after a good year’s worth of research into business models that could provide year-round employment for Orcas and other islands’ residents. Now she employs 12 on San Juan Island, 10 on Orcas, 18 in Washington State that work remotely and 30 in other states nationally.

Has she made mistakes along the way? “Oh of course, and I’ve paid dearly for them,” she said. “Ultimately, you must take a cold look at your business, your budget, and decide how much more effort time, and money to put into a project or new idea before you shelve it. If everything keeps lining up, you keep moving forward.”

The biggest mistake people make is underestimating the limitations of a small population. Jill advocates promoting tourism as a vehicle to draw business people to the islands in hopes that they can bring an existing business or start a new business and establish more job opportunities in the San Juan’s.

Candidates for the Nellie Cashman Business Owner of the Year award are judged based on “their entrepreneurial spirit, ethics and community spirit, financial management skill, and the difficulty and risk they have endured to achieve their success.”

Other finalists this year were:

• Andrea Duffield, MOSAIC Rehabilitation, Inc.
• Niki McKay, Blue Danube Productions
• Makayla Powers, Visiting Angels
• Libby Wagner, Libby Wagner & Associates; “Influencing Options”

Irish-born Nellie Cashman was an American pioneer, philanthropist, entrepreneur and gold prospector. From the time she came west in the late 1860s, “Nellie exhibited her unique style of courage, compassion, determination and spunk that made her one of the most famous women in the American West. Nellie set sizable goals for herself: to make lots of money, and to help anyone who needed it.(from https://womenbusinessowners.org )

Since 1982, the Nellie Cashman Woman Business Owner of the Year Award has recognized and honored Puget Sound area women entrepreneurs who have made outstanding contributions to the status of women business owners through their leadership in business and the community. The award has been given under the direction of WBO since 1996. (for more about Nellie Cashman, read below)

This week, Jill is off-island visiting her son Jeffrey, who is in the Navy. Her other son, Chris, and her daughter Loralee and her family, live on Orcas.

With her intense schedule, Jill knows the necessity of taking a break to refresh. She relaxes by getting outside in the fresh air, meditating, and coming home to Orcas. She says she learned from the late Jane Stickney when she worked with her at ReMax, to “pay attention to your body and don’t let stress take over.”

She’s also committed to the need and benefits of giving back to the community. In 2008, along with Liz Longworth and Lori Gates, Jill founded Orcas Angels, a 501(c)3, whose current project Tech for Success gives four new computers a year to seniors who meet the guidelines based on their essays and merit.

The Nellie Cashman Award
Nellie Cashman started as a mining camp cook and progressed to running a series of boardinghouses and ultimately owning restaurants and grocery stores. And as she gradually tried her hand at mining and prospecting, she maintained a shrewd attitude about not risking more than she could afford to lose, and always having her trade to fall back on.

In 1877 gave the Sisters of St. Ann in Victoria B.C., a large donation towards their hospital building fund. While there, she learned that her fellow miners were stricken with scurvy and were dying. Not heeding official warnings that a midwinter trip would be mad, Nellie organized a rescue party and mustered the supplies necessary to return to camp and restore health to the survivors. The camp’s death toll dropped to zero after her arrival, and the prospectors told anyone who would listen of her defiance of the elements and her tireless care. The “Angel of the Cassiar” legend was born.

Until her death in 1925, Nellie Cashman became as well known for her philanthropy as she was for being a rare woman to not only mine and prospect, but to lead veteran frontiersmen in mining expeditions. (from https://womenbusinessowners.org )