After struggling to return to the workforce as a middle-aged mother, Heather Nemelka now helps others make the transition.
She was living in survival mode. After going through a divorce, Heather Dunford Nemelka (BA ’92, MBA ’18) suddenly found herself in a precarious financial situation as a single mom of five kids. She desperately needed work—but after 18 years away from the workforce, she felt completely unqualified. Her feelings of inadequacy deepened after applying for 88 jobs without success. “It was so scary and discouraging,” she recalls.
Now, more than a decade after reentering the workforce, Nemelka is giving women and mothers the resources and help she wishes she’d had. Part of that, she says, is building confidence by providing “evidence . . . of the great things they’ve done or the hard things they’ve accomplished” outside of the workplace.
Nemelka was eventually offered a position as a marketing coordinator. While she was glad to have found a job, it was painful to be in her 40s and starting an entry-level job meant for recent college grads. She says she was determined to “prove I was a hard worker and . . . get promoted. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Still, even though she was busy working full-time at her new job, raising her kids, and running an Amazon and eBay business, Nemelka couldn’t shake the feeling there was something more she was supposed to do. She prayed and fasted until, one Sunday, a BYU business professor in her ward approached her and proposed the idea of her going back to school to get an MBA. “I audibly laughed,” Nemelka recalls. “The concept of getting my MBA was just ridiculous. I thought, ‘There’s no way.’” She listed the reasons why she couldn’t do it: she wouldn’t get in, she had no time, and she didn’t have enough money.
But after a night of prayer, Nemelka felt that God was calling her to do this, even if she couldn’t see the way forward. In what she calls a series of miraculous circumstances, she got the recommendation letters she needed, made it into BYU’s executive MBA program, and was awarded a scholarship for single mothers.
But divine intervention didn’t make business school easy.
She was waking up at 4 a.m. to study before her kids awoke, then studying after they went to bed. Nemelka remembers “driving home . . . and just banging the dashboard and crying because it was so hard. I felt like I was doing the most impossible thing.” God was the reason she’d decided to get her MBA—so why wouldn’t He make it easier for her?
But then she recognized it was never supposed to be easy. “The hardest things are where we grow, and if we’re going to allow ourselves . . . to become the person our Heavenly Father has always wanted us to become, we have to be willing to accept hard things,” she realized. “Magic happens . . . in the difficult times.”
In 2023 Nemelka drew on the knowledge and resources from her experiences reentering the workforce and getting an MBA to create Elavare, a mentoring organization dedicated to supporting women in need of confidence at any life stage through moving up in the workplace, balancing work and family as a single mom, or finding purpose as an empty nester.
With the help of students in the Marriott School’s On-Campus Internship program, Nemelka interviewed more than 100 mothers and found the need for these resources was real. When building Elavare, Nemelka thought, “What are all of the things I wished I had?” Now Elavare provides newsletters, blog posts, workshops, online courses, consultations, summits, a podcast, and general coaching and mentorship.
Nemelka started Elavare while working full-time. Not only was building the organization time consuming, but it was unfamiliar terrain. She doubted herself—did she have the skill set and knowledge necessary to make a difference? Despite those doubts, she says, “At my core, I knew that Heavenly Father wanted me to help His daughters. That’s kept me going all along.”
Today, Elevare’s mission extends beyond mothers returning to work. Through workshops, Nemelka partners with organizations to help employees speak up, build authentic networks, prevent burnout, and even learn practical AI skills—creating stronger teams, higher engagement, and better retention.
When the work gets overwhelming, Nemelka is motivated and inspired by messages she gets from women saying that they didn’t have the confidence to apply for a job or another career opportunity until they watched one of her videos or attended her summit and thought, “Maybe I can do it.”
Nemelka says women are stronger and more capable than they often think they are. Many women “don’t think they have any skills, and yet they’ve been doing project management, conflict resolution, event planning, and budgeting—all of these things mothers do so beautifully,” she notes. “I’m on a mission to help them and companies realize how that skill set completely transfers.”
Her premise is summed up on Elavare’s website: “Stay-at-home moms never left the workforce, they just had a job transfer.”
