Rachel Zimmerman Belongs on the Women Changing the City Panel

Some emails you skim. This one stopped me on the third name down the panel list.

The Center City Business Association had sent around its invitation for the next Women Changing the City morning, and there, under Kelly Frank of CBS Philadelphia and Dr. Alycia A. Marshall of Community College of Philadelphia, sat Rachel Zimmerman. Founding Executive Director, InLiquid Art + Design. My friend Rachel. The person who has spent decades making sure artists in this city have somewhere to show work, somewhere to sell it, and somebody in the room arguing that both of those things matter to Philadelphia’s economy and not only to its mood.

I am biased and I would rather say so at the top than pretend otherwise. I have known Rachel a long time, I have stood in rooms she built, and I have written about her work on this site more than once. The bias does not weaken the argument I want to make, which is that the chair she takes on Tuesday, October 27 is one of the more interesting chairs anybody in Philadelphia will sit in that morning, and that a lot of people who should be there are going to talk themselves out of it.

What the Center City Business Association Built With This Series

Start with the host, because the host explains the room. The Center City Business Association is a nonprofit, member supported chamber of commerce, and it goes back further than most people assume. Six city leaders put it together in 1978 under the name Center City Proprietors Association, held their first public meeting that May, and the organization only took its current name in a 2022 rebrand, according to the association’s own history. Almost fifty years of Philadelphia business people showing up for each other in the same few square miles.

Women Changing the City is one of its recurring programs, and the framing is deliberately personal rather than corporate. The association describes it as a series where professionals from the business community reveal, in its words, “the inner strength, vision and imagination that leads to motivation, influence, and professional and personal growth,” with real time set aside for questions and for the part that actually moves careers, which is the standing around afterward. Four partner organizations are attached to the October morning: NAWBO Philadelphia, The Philly Ad Club, Women’s Business Enterprise Center East, which certifies women owned businesses for the City of Philadelphia and the Commonwealth, and the Women’s Opportunities Resource Center, which has spent roughly thirty years helping people here get a business off the ground with planning help, loans, grants and mentoring.

That is not a decorative partner list. That is four organizations whose entire job is capital, certification, contracts and clients for women who run businesses here, all pointed at the same two hours.

What Rachel Zimmerman Has Built Since 1999

Now the part I know best. Rachel founded InLiquid in 1999, when the idea of putting a regional artist roster online was still novel, and she has run it ever since as its Founding Executive Director. The organization now supports more than 350 professional artists across Greater Philadelphia. Its stated mission is to make “the contemporary visual arts culture of the Philadelphia region more accessible, working to support artists, unite communities, and nurture the public’s appreciation of the visual arts.”

Read that sentence again with a business head on. Accessible. Support. Unite. Those are distribution words. What InLiquid does, underneath the exhibitions, is solve a market failure: talented people producing valuable work with no reliable route to the buyers, the walls, the press or the commissions that would let them keep producing it. The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance put numbers on the scale when it honored her in 2024, describing an organization that backs the careers of over 300 working artists a year and mounts more than 40 public exhibitions annually out of its flagship gallery at the Crane Arts Building and satellite spaces around the city.

The award she received that night was the Collaborator Award, which the Alliance defines as recognition for “an individual who has exemplified this principle through collaboration with organizations in the arts and culture community and across the Philadelphia region.” Of all the prizes an arts leader can win, that is the one that says the quiet thing out loud. She does not win by holding territory. She wins by getting other people into the same room, which happens to be exactly the skill a business panel is asking about.

I have watched it work up close. I wrote here about the launch of March for the Arts, where the proceeds split evenly between the organization and the artists in the show, which tells you what she thinks an artist is worth. And I wrote about InLiquid at The Laurel, where she turned private residential space on Rittenhouse Square into a public conversation. Nobody handed her either of those rooms. She went and got them.

The Other Two Chairs and the Woman Running the Conversation

The rest of the panel is not filler, and I want to be honest that two of these names I know by reputation rather than personally.

Kelly Frank runs CBS Philadelphia as President and General Manager, a role she has held since 2022, when Next TV reported her appointment over the KYW and WPSG stations. She came in from a content job in Tampa and has spent the years since deciding what gets covered in this market, which is a quieter kind of civic power than most people realize.

Dr. Alycia A. Marshall is the seventh president of Community College of Philadelphia. Before that she was the College’s provost and vice president for Academic and Student Success, running Academic Affairs, Workforce Development and Student Support and Engagement, and she held the job on an interim basis before being named president in October 2025 after a nationwide search. She began in higher education as a tenured full professor of mathematics at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, which tells you something about how she reads a budget. If you want to understand Philadelphia’s workforce over the next ten years, she runs the building where a great deal of it gets decided.

Moderating is Heather Major, who was named President of the Independence Blue Cross Foundation in September 2026 after more than fourteen years there, most recently as Executive Director. The Foundation marks fifteen years this year and expects to pass one hundred million dollars in funding distributed to area programs. A panel is only as good as the person asking the questions, and she has spent her career on health access, workforce and community health, which are the subjects underneath everything the other three do.

Fellas, Read the Fine Print

Here is the line in the invitation that I keep coming back to. The note that landed in my inbox says plainly that men are welcome and encouraged to attend. Encouraged. Somebody wrote that word on purpose.

I would bet money that a hundred men in this city will read that and still decide it was not addressed to them. Do not be one of them. A room where the head of a network station, the president of a college and the founder of an arts organization talk honestly about how they actually got there is not a room you attend as a gesture of support. It is a room you attend because those three have information you do not have, and because two hours of it costs less than a decent dinner.

If your professional network is mostly men who look and think like you, the cheapest fix available to you this fall is on the calendar for October 27 and takes two hours.

How to Actually Be There on October 27

The details, plainly, because event posts that skip them are just applause. The panel runs Tuesday, October 27, 2026, from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM at Independence Blue Cross, 1901 Market Street, 23rd Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19103. Tickets are forty five dollars for members, fifty five for partners and seventy five for guests, and that covers the panel, the Q and A, the networking and light refreshments. Space is limited, and reservations and prepayment are required, which in practice means the people who put it in their calendar in September are the ones in the chairs in October. Everything above comes straight from the association’s listing for the event, and registration runs through that same page.

An Arts Seat at a Business Table Is the Whole Point

One last thing, and it is the reason I care about this particular panel rather than just about my friend.

Somebody had to decide that a visual arts organization belonged on a business association stage alongside broadcasting and higher education. That decision is the interesting part. Culture in this city is treated too often as the nice thing you fund after the serious work is paid for, when the numbers say otherwise: the Cultural Alliance’s Arts, Culture and Economic Prosperity study found a total economic impact of 3.3 billion dollars across the five county region, with 1.9 billion of that in direct spending by organizations and their audiences, measured between May 2022 and June 2023. That is an industry. It employs people, fills restaurants, fills hotel rooms and gives this city a reason to be visited in a year when the whole world is looking at us.

Rachel has spent her career building the thing that produces those numbers, one artist and one wall at a time. She is not on that panel as the arts representative. She is on it as somebody who built a durable Philadelphia institution from nothing, in a sector that gets told constantly that it is not a real business, and who is still here in 2026 with three hundred and fifty artists behind her. I will be honored to watch her say so out loud, and I hope the room is full of people who came to learn rather than to nod.