Meet Million Dollar Women

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For more than four decades, Hope Criss Thomas has dedicated her life to empowering women and girls, developing leaders, strengthening communities, building businesses, and advancing a message of purpose, faith, economic empowerment, and generational impact. Today, those decades of experience converge in Million Dollar Women™, the global wealth and legacy movement she founded to equip women with the financial intelligence, mindset, strategies, and confidence to build wealth intentionally and create legacies that impact generations. For Hope, Million Dollar Women is not simply another business venture. It is the convergence of a lifetime of preparation.

Long before the creation of Million Dollar Women, Hope was creating spaces where women could discover their voices, develop leadership, and confront issues affecting their lives and communities. Beginning with women's conferences at the University of Texas at Arlington, she spent years convening women, leaders, activists, and organizations for dialogue, education, and empowerment. Her work connected her with organizations and movements including the American Indian Movement, Pan African Congress, Women in the Nation of Islam, and numerous other national and international groups.

Over the years, she has hosted conferences and delegations and served as a keynote speaker before diverse audiences throughout the United States and internationally. 

Her global journey began with her first trip to Nairobi, Kenya, around 1988. Since then, her leadership and women's empowerment work has taken her to countries including Senegal; Conakry, Guinea; and Lusaka, Zambia, where she has participated in leadership and women's conferences, including two visits to Zambia. In 2026, Hope was invited to serve as a keynote speaker for the 10th Anniversary of Distinguished Women International, another chapter in a journey of encouraging women to recognize their purpose, power, and capacity for impact.

Hope also brings decades of corporate and entrepreneurial experience to Million Dollar Women. During a 20-year career with IBM, as a Million Dollar Problem Solver, working with fortune 100 and 500 corporations, she built a successful professional career and earned more than $1 million in cumulative income.

That experience helped shape one of the convictions now at the heart of MDW: Earning money and building wealth are not the same thing.

A woman can work hard, build a successful career, earn substantial income, care for her family, and still discover that she was never adequately taught how to convert income into assets, ownership, financial security, and generational wealth. 

That distinction is one reason Hope is passionate about helping women—particularly those entering the second half of life—understand that their financial story is not finished. Her message is simple: Start where you are. Build what you can. Multiply what you build. Leave something behind.
 

Hope's entrepreneurial experience extends well beyond corporate America. Together with her husband, Mr. Thomas, she has spent more than 5 years building Valerie Security Services, giving her firsthand experience with entrepreneurship, ownership, longevity, leadership, and the realities of building something intended to endure.

Hope's commitment to changing lives has never been limited to adults. Before IBM, she served as Program Director for the Dallas County Advocate Program, working with teenagers involved in the juvenile justice system. Under her leadership, the program experienced significant growth in its work with Dallas County while helping young people pursue alternatives to adult incarceration, gangs, violence, and destructive life trajectories.

She later founded Rubies, Diamonds & Pearls, a conference created specifically for teenage girls and centered on purity, purpose, and passion.

That commitment reflects a philosophy that would eventually become central to Million Dollar Women: If we want to change generations, we cannot wait until the next generation becomes adults to begin teaching them.

Women's empowerment has remained a defining thread throughout Hope's life. In 2010, she founded 1 Million Women In Prayer, launching the movement in Dallas, Texas, with more than 300 women attending from across the United States. In 2022, the work was relaunched through 1 Million Women In Prayer: Purpose & Power with Women Arise, continuing her commitment to bringing women together around prayer, purpose, spiritual development, and action.  She continues to host annual conferences.  

For nearly a decade, Hope also served as a Central Committee member of a worldwide political party, including serving as its Women's Coordinator. Her work provided experience in global leadership, organizational development, women's mobilization, and working across cultures and communities.

Today, she serves as Vice President of International Women's Prayer Network, founded by Bishop Cynthia Williams. The global network brings women from around the world together in daily prayer and hosts virtual conferences and international gatherings designed to strengthen women spiritually and connect them across borders.

At the foundation of Hope's life and leadership is her faith in Jesus Christ. She makes no distinction between the gifts God has entrusted to her and the responsibility to use those gifts in service to others. She considers herself first and foremost an Ambassador for the Kingdom of God.

Hope served for seven years in her family church under her uncle, Pastor Jack Criss Sr., at Greater New Mount Hermon Baptist Church in Dallas.

In February 2025, she became the founding pastor of Fresh Aroma Embassy Church. The ministry's work extends beyond the walls of the church. Each month, Hope and the Fresh Aroma Embassy Church family minister to people experiencing homelessness, typically serving approximately 300 people with meals, Bibles, snacks, hygiene supplies, ice-cold water, prayer, and personal ministry.

She has traveled throughout the United States preaching the Gospel and has spoken on numerous college campuses, carrying a message that consistently connects faith with purpose, responsibility, leadership, and action.

For Hope, legacy is deeply personal. She and her husband have built a life, family, and business together for more than three decades. They are the parents of three adult children, each of whom is actively serving in the house of God. That experience has deepened her conviction that what one generation builds should not end with that generation. It should be taught. Stewarded. Multiplied. Protected. And transferred. That belief is reflected in the foundational scripture of Million Dollar Women:

                                                   “A good person leaves an inheritance to their children's children.” — Proverbs 13:22
 

After decades spanning corporate America, entrepreneurship, youth advocacy, women's empowerment, international leadership, ministry, public speaking, community service, and family, Hope recognized that these experiences were not isolated chapters. They were preparation.  Million Dollar Women™ brings those chapters together. Through financial education, coaching, transformational experiences, community, media, and signature initiatives such as My Wealth Decade™, Hope is building an ecosystem designed to help women understand their finances, strengthen their financial intelligence, build assets and ownership, discover purpose, prepare for their futures, and intentionally create legacies.

She is especially passionate about the woman who reaches her 40s, 50s, 60s or beyond and realizes she has little or nothing saved for retirement.

Hope refuses to tell that woman her opportunity has passed. Instead, she asks: What if the next ten years became your Wealth Decade?
 

The objective is not to promise every woman that she will accumulate a million dollars. It is to help her become financially stronger tomorrow than she is today—and to equip her with financial knowledge that can be transferred to her daughters, granddaughters, and generations she may never personally meet. Because Hope believes generational wealth begins long before an inheritance changes hands. It begins when knowledge changes hands.

And that is the work of Million Dollar Women.