The Independency Community Coalition aims to make it easier to support our freelancers, through shared insight and resources.
We’ll be introducing each of our founding community members over the coming months. first up is Emma Ahlert, founder of Elsie, the first global network for freelancers in female and sexual health.
Emma ’s journey into building communities for freelancers in the female and sexual healthcare sector began with advocacy work at her US undergraduate university, facilitating workshops about domestic violence awareness and healthy relationships. She then moved to Edinburgh to pursue a master’s degree in the sociology of emotion, “with a focus on how access to sex education as young people impacts our emotional health in adulthood and how comprehensive sex ed is actually a human right because it sets us up in a lot of ways moving forward with boundaries and communication.”
While in Edinburgh, Emma became deeply involved in grassroots campaigning for anti-harassment buffer zones around abortion clinics in Scotland. “Actually, that campaigning experience is where I got my first freelance job, which was doing social media for a big tampon company in London.” Over the next couple of years, she built a portfolio of around 10 brands spanning bladder care, period care, gut health, and menopause — all through word of mouth.
The Birth of Elsie
Emma’s path to entrepreneurship was unconventional. “In 2021, I was put in a very strange position in the UK where my degree had finished and I needed to either get a full-time job, start a business or move home, and it was completely covid so there was nobody hiring.” She chose to start a business despite never having freelanced before, initially launching a generalist platform before pivoting to focus on female and sexual healthcare.
Today, Elsie — named after a Scottish suffragette who started the first Women’s Health Hospital in Edinburgh — is her community for people who work in the sector, “building on all the pain points that I learned building my portfolio in the space.”
A Global Community Addressing Unique Challenges
The female and sexual healthcare sector is “super, super underfunded—it gets about 2% of VC funding,” Emma explains. “So there’s a kind of disproportionate reliance on freelance, part-time, flexible contract work.” Combined with taboo and censorship issues, this creates sector-specific pain points that general freelance communities can’t fully address.
What started with uncertain expectations has grown into a truly international community with members from over 15 countries. “People say that female sexual healthcare is niche, when actually I think it’s probably one of the most commonly pervasive topics that affects everybody.”
Emma built the community around three core pain points: “Trouble finding work, trouble building community, and lack of sector-specific upskilling.” Members get access to constantly updated channels of jobs, gigs, industry events, and research opportunities, along with monthly webinars and both virtual and in-person networking events.
More Than Just Business
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of Elsie is its impact on members’ emotional wellbeing. After going through a major breakup in Edinburgh, Emma found herself alone in the city. “The only way that I made every single friend that I have is I went to every single networking event I could find on related topics I cared about, and I went up to people and asked them if they would like to be my friend.”
This personal experience shaped her vision for Elsie as something more than transactional. “I really don’t want it to be just a job board or somewhere you visit and you get a gig and then you leave. I think there’s a direct correlation between the strength of our community and the sustainability of our business.”
Six months in, Emma conducted a survey asking what shouldn’t change as Elsie grows. “People said the way that it makes me feel. I did a sentence that said how I felt before Elsie and how I feel now that I’m here, and most people all over the world free wrote: before Elsie I felt alone and now I feel seen.”
Her hope for members is clear: “I love having that idea if you’ve got a place that no matter what happens with your work, you’re always welcome back at this space. I hope it gives you more gigs and I hope it teaches you new things, but at the end of the day, I hope you know you always get a response and there’s always somebody here if you need anything.”
To learn more about Elsie or join the community, visit veryelsie.com or find Emma Ahlert on LinkedIn.
