In 2009, Ursula Burns became the first Black woman to run a Fortune 500 company. She led Xerox, a corporation with roughly $20 billion in revenue at its peak under her, after starting there as a summer engineering intern in 1980. The road to that corner office started in a public-housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in an apartment run by a single mother whose best year of income was $4,400.

Plain disclosure first: Ursula Burns is not a solo mom. She is on this shelf because she was raised by one, and because her life shows what the kids of solo moms can become. The mother, Olga Burns, is the story.

Before

Olga Burns, a Panamanian immigrant, raised three children alone in a New York City housing project. She ran a licensed child-care business out of the apartment, took in ironing, and cleaned offices in exchange for what her family needed. Her highest recorded annual income was $4,400, and out of it she paid Catholic school tuition for her kids, because education was the one line in her budget that never got cut (Britannica).

Ursula was good at math. That skill, plus her mother’s refusal to let the neighborhood define the family, carried her to Polytechnic Institute of New York for a degree in mechanical engineering and then to Columbia for a master’s. In 1980 she took a summer internship at Xerox. She stayed for 36 years (Britannica).

The turn

Burns rose through engineering, product development, and manufacturing, the unglamorous parts of the company where the machines either work or they do not. Along the way she became known for saying plainly what others softened, a habit that got her noticed by senior leadership rather than punished, and she credits the directness to how she was raised. The girl from the projects did not learn to perform polish. She learned to solve the problem in front of her, which is the exact skill a one-income household teaches daily.

The build

The milestones read like a staircase built one flight at a time:

• 1980: joins Xerox as a mechanical engineering summer intern and converts to full time after graduate school (Britannica).
• 2009: named CEO of Xerox, the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company, and takes on the chairman role the following year (Britannica).
• 2009 to 2017: leads Xerox as CEO until the end of 2016 and chairs the board until 2017, steering the company’s shift deeper into services; she later chairs and serves on boards of major global companies (Britannica).
• 2021: publishes her memoir, titled with her mother’s sentence: Where You Are Is Not Who You Are (NPR’s Here and Now, June 2021).

The corner office was never the finish line. After Xerox she chaired and briefly ran the global telecom group VEON, and she has served on the boards of some of the largest companies in the world, including Uber and ExxonMobil (Britannica). She has spent years pushing more women, and more kids from neighborhoods like hers, toward engineering and the rooms where decisions get made.

Ask Burns where the engine came from and she does not talk about Xerox. She talks about Olga, and about the sentence her mother repeated in that apartment, the one that ended up on the cover of her book.

“This place that we live in that is run down and dirty, this neighborhood that we live in that is disordered and not cared for, is not who you are. Who you are is the people you surround yourself with, who you are is the values that you have.”

Ursula Burns, recalling her mother’s words, NPR’s Here and Now, June 2021

Sit with what Olga Burns was doing there. On $4,400 a year she could not change the building, the block, or the math. So she drew a hard line between circumstances and identity, and she made her kids memorize the difference. Three children raised on that line, and one of them ran a Fortune 500 company. The zip code never got a vote.

What you can take from this

1. Your kids are watching how, not how much. Olga’s income never crossed five figures, and she still raised a CEO, because what the kids absorbed was resourcefulness: the child-care business, the ironing, the bartered office cleaning. Every income stream you build teaches your kids the same lesson. The Business toolkit helps you build them on the hours you have.
2. Pick the one budget line that never gets cut. For Olga it was education. On one income you cannot protect everything, so decide on purpose what you protect first. Our Money toolkit is built for exactly that decision.
3. Say the sentence out loud. “Where you are is not who you are” did its work because it was repeated until it stuck. Your kids need a sentence like that from you, said in hard weeks, not just good ones. For the good weeks, the Fun with Kids toolkit keeps them full of things to remember.

More stories, more tools

Ursula Burns’ story, and her mother’s, is one of a growing shelf. Read the rest on our Stories of Success page, and join the weekly SoloMom email from the homepage to get each new story in your inbox with the tools to use it.

Verification note: the raised-by-a-single-mother framing, career facts, and the quote above were checked against the linked sources in July 2026. Burns is included as the daughter of a solo mom, and that is stated plainly above. Quotes are reproduced verbatim.