Women Standing Together...in action

Before we left for Seattle (where we are attending the Women's Funding Network annual event... more on that later), we hosted the first Women Standing Together Breakfast of 2007. Women Standing Together is a group of women in business who pool their membership fees to support economic security programs through the Maine Women's Fund. Collectively -- they have given over $50,000 to help Maine's women and girls. Twice a year the network convenes to learn more about the issues and hear from grantees. This year, the disucssion was a bit different. While out on our listening tour, the role of women in business and women entrepreneurs was a repeated theme. "Women have always been in business so their husbands can farm,' said one women in Orono. Women are 51.5% of the population in Maine, own 63,000 businesses, employ 75,000 people, and generate $9 billion in sales. Nationally, women owned businesses are the fastest growing form of the economy. As far as economic actions goes, women are in the hot seat. Economic development is a sure way of creating a bright future of women and girls -- especially when the economic target is women, because when women prosper, whole communities thrive. It became obvious that our women in business have the potential to create far more than just grants -- they are role models for girls to aspire to and they are wealth and job creators. What if we could create an environment that made it easy for women entrepreneurs to take off and succeed, as well as help Maine become a niche market for women in business? That was the subject of our Women Standing Together breakfast. The breakfast was co-hosted by two other stakeholders -- Maine Center for Creativity that is dedicated to supporting the creative economy and Maine & Co. that is dedicated to creating new jobs and businesses in Maine. The breakfast created a lot of ideas and energy and a few key easy-to-fix needs emerged from the conversation. While Maine is plentiful in resources for women in business, finding those resources is difficult. Each individual women had individuals that had helped them in an instrumental, but there was lacking a regular network of women or the ability to share networks. The Maine Women's Fund is committed to pushing these ideas further into action. We intend to take this conversation to Bangor and Lewiston/Auburn to build a stronger network and more ideas to help us further build an enabling environment for women in buisness. We intend to convene these groups a few more times to enhance networking opportunities. And we intend to react to the a few of the great ideas that can help Maine truly own and celebrate the power of women in business.