Portrait photography by Kyle Norton
A child in the Bahamas, in a little wooden house on four cinder blocks with no electricity or indoor plumbing, reading the encyclopedia by the light of a kerosene lamp; a studious college student in snowy Canada, summer clothes layered underneath a winter coat she sewed herself; a Black female CFO in her 30s, being promoted to managing director; a mom and businesswoman, running a nonprofit in Greenwich and spending her weekdays as a fellow at Harvard.
All of these images are from the story of Rhonda Eldridge’s life. If anyone is capable of spreading knowledge and hope, it is this superwoman who has made Cos Cob her home for 20 years.
In 2016, after weathering the storm of the 2008 financial crisis—and watching others capsize during that time—Rhonda launched Harness All Possibilities (HAP), a 501c3 that provides “a cross-generation network, information and tools for those displaced in work or in underserved communities to explore, adapt and embrace a growth mindset for 21st century engagement.” In simple terms, Rhonda helps people get “unstuck.”
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Back in the 1970s, Rhonda was stuck. It wasn’t that she felt frustrated with her situation: no indoor toilet, no phone, a single mom who worked day and night, siblings who had to live with their grandparents on another island. “I didn’t know any other way, so I was fine,” says Rhonda. But what did not seem normal or even comprehensible to her was math. “I just didn’t get it,” she recalls.
Rhonda’s mother, who had an eighth-grade education, was determined to set up her daughter for a better life. They lived “over da hill” in the Grove area of the Bahamas, meaning in the ghetto. “She knew education was the way to get me out,” says Rhonda. “Mrs. Russell, an Austrian woman married to a Bahamian, came into our neighborhood selling encyclopedias. My mom bought a set with a $2 payment plan, $2 a month. That was my exploration into another world.”
Rhonda failed her exams for the private school her mom hoped she could attend. “I was atrocious at math,” says Rhonda. “My mom got me a tutor and said she would pay for one last entrance exam. Math finally clicked.”
Rhonda was admitted to the private school and was the top student for her five years there. She graduated at 16 and had to go to right to work. She took evening classes, hoping to work toward a banking degree. “It was when I got the top awards in banking that a professor said to me, ‘You need to try to get off the island and take your education to another level.’ So I started looking for scholarships,” says Rhonda.
She landed a merit scholarship and chose Queens University in Canada, where all of her expenses were covered except clothing. “I made my own winter coat and bundled up in my summer clothes,” she says. Snow didn’t faze her.
RISE AND FALL
Rhonda graduated a semester early from college and was recruited by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers in December of 1988. She worked as an auditor for a year and then was transferred back to the Bahamas, where she soon found herself lured by a job in the investment world. Her trajectory was rapid: from a CFO trading derivatives to the lead on acquisitions to managing director working with billion-dollar hedge funds. She was commended for her competence but warned about her limitations: “‘You are a woman and you are Black,’ I was told,” says Rhonda. “But I just kept working hard. No one in that world looked like me.
That didn’t matter to my clients. They liked me.”
In 2002, Rhonda was offered a managing director position in the U.S. She shared a cramped New York apartment with her husband (now the owner of Eldridge Wood Design in Stamford), their baby and two dogs. When a friend invited her to take a ride on Metro North and come on out to Riverside, she was hooked. Rhonda and her family rented a home in 2003 and bought a house in Cos Cob a year later. “We are still in that house today,” says Rhonda.
The financial crisis in 2008 is what planted the seed for HAP. “Our bank had blown up,” recounts Rhonda. “Everyone was having a hard time. People were being laid off. The train here in Greenwich went from this to this.”
She holds up her hands to demonstrate the shift from packed to a trickle.
At the same time, Rhonda was battling breast cancer, and then a year later, in 2009, thyroid cancer. “We lost a lot of our benefits. I was hustling to rebuild the company and keep my job. It was a convergence of everything that can go wrong,” says Rhonda, whose daughter was five at the time (she is now 23 and at UConn; her other daughter, adopted as a newborn in Florida, is 14). “You get to a point in life—I had a wonderful career—but I was starting to see the world from a different perspective,” she says. “I thought, Who am I? What is the meaning I’m giving to my life?”
She began shifting away from material trappings.
HARNESS ALL POSSIBILITIES
“I started meeting people and telling them who to call, and those introductions helped people to then get jobs. I’d meet here a lot.” She means Aux Délices in Riverside, where she sits now, in a casual mustard turtleneck and burgundy pants—like the colors of the leaves turning on the trees outside, just as they did after the market tumbled in 2008. And as they did the year after that. And the year after that … Life goes on. Rhonda wears a smile and has an easy demeanor. In Rhonda’s world, you pick yourself up and figure it out.
“I found that people became stuck,” says Rhonda. “The skills they had for 20 years were not going to be the skills needed going forward.” She advised considering “mini careers” and becoming “a lifetime learner.” Rhonda had been delving into a new realm herself: blockchain (a technology for securely recording and sharing information). She had heard the term at a Barclay Rise event in 2014 and then spent several years building her know-how in a friend’s business. “We were using our traditional skills to reinvent ourselves,” she says. She envisioned helping others do the same.
With guidance from SCORE (a small business mentoring company), Rhonda incorporated HAP and a few months later secured 501c3 status. She held her first blockchain event at the early hour of 7 a.m. and 30 people came. She held an event at Trinity Church and at a packed room at Greenwich Library, with free food for attendees. People came from as far as New Jersey and D.C. “I think blockchain is the next big thing,” they would say, as to why they had made the trip. The Greenwich Sentinel published an article on her event: “Five Stages of Unemployment: From Grief into Hope.” Her days were packed with mentoring people. “If we don’t address the millions being displaced during a financial crisis, they will drop to the bottom of the social-economic strata,” says Rhonda, “and we’ll have a big problem. It’s not that people weren’t skilled; they had no hope.”
Riverside resident Will Rogers, HAP Director, met Rhonda through a Trinity Church networking group. “Rhonda saw firsthand at our meetings the need for folks in transition, particularly those who had been in the workforce for a while, to be reeducated and retrained with new and changing skills to reenter the financial technology industry. She was fascinated by blockchain and wanted to get people familiarized with it and trained. When I saw her vision for HAP, I was more than glad to do what I could to help her get started.”
HAP serves people of all ages. “At our first youth event, there was a four-year-old,” says Rhonda. “He’s now a very confident coder.” Phelton Petit-Frere, a teen in the Bahamas, proved to be a coding wiz at 13, got a certificate as a blockchain developer and hosted his own event at 15, with encouragement from Rhonda. “I told him, I want you to go and find others in your community who are underserved. He asked, ‘What is underserved?’” She explained what that meant and that he was. Phelton then earned enough from the event to buy his own computer.
From orphans to teen moms to professionals searching for a new path, HAP and its Blockchain Business School bring hope. Examples of the 150 events HAP has held include: Cryptocurrencies, Use LinkedIn to Get Unstuck, Blockchain Shift: Digital ID, The Unique You, Youth Blockchain & AI Hackathon, Coding 101, and Exploring our Ethical Horizon (Regulations, Operational Due Diligence & Corporate Governance in a Digital World).
Between 2020 and 2022, HAP purchased devices for families in five countries who were disconnected. Rhonda has taken HAP to her native Bahamas. One of the programs HAP runs there, in conjunction with Microsoft, is TeachTeenMomsTech, an AI coding crash course for teen moms. HAP launched a TechKYouth event in the Cayman Islands last summer (see sidebar). “Our goal is to close the digital knowledge gap for teachers and students,” says Rhonda. In 2021, she was named among the Top 50 Caribbean Women In Tech by SiliconCaribe and appointed to the global board of directors of Help for Children.
As the framework for programs is fine-tuned in Caribbean markets, Rhonda is expanding her own skills as a fellow in Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. There are 41 students in this year’s group, with access to any course at Harvard. Rhonda is working on a project focused on “the third chapter of our lives,” she says, “something that we want to do to use our wisdom to benefit the world. It is a spiritual journey; what is our ‘why.’”
Rhonda hopes to bring HAP’s course for teen moms to Stamford through Women’s Mentoring Network. “I’ve also spoken with a few digital asset firms in Stamford about hosting a Youth Conference in the area, perhaps at the Greenwich Library,” she says. “I’ve worked with students I have met via Women’s Mentoring Network, hoping they can be co-designers of the event.”
Lana Gifas, Executive Director of Women’s Mentoring Network, comments, “It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Rhonda over the years. The students of Women’s Mentoring Network benefitted from programs led by Rhonda that helped to close the digital divide during the pandemic, which was such a critical time for children. From providing devices to students to group sessions on blockchain and coding, HAP’s programs are so appreciated.”
Rhonda has never earned a salary for the tremendous amount of work she has put into Harness All Possibilities. “Having the courage to be with people in very low places—that gave my life meaning,” she says.
LEARN MORE, DONATE, BE A MENTOR: HARNESSAP.ORG
Partnership Growth
I got involved with HAP in 2021 when I was recommended by a mentor from Code Cayman. HAP invited me to participate in their Blockchain Business School, where I had the opportunity to interview a speaker in front of a large virtual audience. Following that, HAP sponsored me to do an 11-week blockchain bootcamp. HAP has had a massive influence on my educational and career journey, shaping both my technical skills and personal growth. The program helped me develop key leadership and management skills and also reinforced my desire to build a career that merges technology with impactful community-driven projects.
Last year, Rhonda and I launched TechKYouth to bring awareness and education around emerging technologies to youth in the Cayman Islands. The existing programs focus on beginner coding and robotics, leaving a gap in more advanced tech fields like blockchain, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. The two-day conference and hackathon featured speakers from prominent organizations such as Microsoft, Polkadot, the Cayman Islands Government, Walkers and more. We also wanted to highlight practical tech applications for local industries, helping youth understand how they could use these technologies on the island.”
—KATHRYN CORKISH
Cayman Islands (currently at Newcastle University in the UK)