Rachel Schromen and Erin Pash have put $50,000 of their own money on the table. They will spend all of it only if other Minnesotans give first.
The two founders have launched the Minnesota Challenge Campaign for the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. For every gift a Minnesotan makes, Schromen and Pash will match it dollar for dollar, up to a $50,000 cap. The campaign opened Sunday, November 1, 2026, and runs through Wednesday, March 31, 2027. If donors reach the full match, the campaign will send $100,000 to the museum. The announcement, made Monday, November 2, calls it the first Minnesota based campaign of its kind for the museum.
Schromen runs an estate planning and elder law practice in St. Paul. She is founder and managing attorney of Schromen Law, LLC, a firm she built in 2016. At Winona State University she majored in Law and Society and minored in Women’s and Gender Studies.
Pash built a national company from a single Minnesota clinic. She founded Ellie Mental Health in 2015 and led it from one corporate owned clinic in Minnesota to 260 clinics across 40 states, according to the company’s own account of her tenure. She is now chief executive and founder of Pash Co and is chairwoman of Ellie’s board. “Both of us built our businesses from nothing, and we know what it takes for someone to believe in you early,” Pash said. “The women who shaped this country deserve a visible place in the national record, and Minnesota can help make that record more complete.”
The museum they are raising money for has no building a donor can visit. Congress created the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum on December 27, 2020. The Smithsonian is still working with Congress to finalize a site on the National Mall, and the museum’s own guidance says it will be at least ten years before a physical building opens to the public. The museum will be built through a public private partnership, with federal appropriations on one side and philanthropy on the other. Melanie Adams, PhD, leads the museum now as interim director.
The work, in the meantime, is preservation done without walls. The museum’s oral history project, We Do Declare: Women’s Voices on Independence, began in 2024 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, the law that made it illegal for banks to deny women credit based on sex or marital status. Led by curator Rachel Seidman, the project has recorded more than 30 oral histories. The full set debuted online March 1. Voices first. Building later.
Minnesota already has a formal place in the museum’s structure. The Making History Network, the museum’s nationwide ambassador program, lists 15 Minnesota ambassadors by name, from Ruth Buffalo to Ka Vang. Ambassadors give an annual gift and support events in their communities. Schromen and Pash do not appear on that roster. Their campaign sits alongside it, open to any Minnesotan, and any gift in the campaign window counts toward the match until the cap is reached. The museum accepts gifts on its website.
A match this size is not really two checks. It is a test of whether a state will organize itself around a record still being written, one oral history and one gift at a time. “Women have always built things by pulling their communities together, and that is exactly what this campaign asks Minnesotans to do,” Schromen said. “Our gifts open the door. The match only reaches its full size if our neighbors walk through it with us.”
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