Gender Equality United States Project #32254

Leveling the Playing Field For 5 Female Founders

by IAEOU

Leveling the Playing Field For 5 Female Founders

Project Report | Feb 27, 2019
5th Female Founder and New Illinois Project

By Lisa Canning | Project Leader

Sana & Lisa met for the first time late last fall

Dear Friend,

You subscribed to email updates from Let's Level the Playing Field For Female Founders by IAEOU, a project on GlobalGiving. Here's the unedited update from the field:

5th female founder and Illinois Project
By Lisa Canning - Project Leader

Hello friends!

We are pleased to report that we have found our 5th and final female founder for the purpose of completing our first GlobalGiving project as well as excited to announce our next big project.

5th Founder

Delescia Kimbrough from Infinite Assistance needed to rebrand her business and improve her storytelling and website to build her businesses. We have just begun work on helping her rewrite and redesign her site. We will be sure to share it with you when we are done.

Illinois Project Soon to Launch

We are excited to announce our strategic partnership with New York-based global entrepreneurial ecosystem builder In Focus Brands. Robert Manasier its founder has been behind the scenes building successful initiatives like New York’s Innovate 518. Having successfully helped hundreds of businesses from seed to IPO grow, and raise funds, our alliance brings a wealth of resources to Illinois- and especially to women- that we together we will begin to deploy for entrepreneurs this spring. We are working to finalize partnerships with several other organizations-soon to be announced.

And we are looking to raise more funds for 5 more female founders to support. Will you consider donating again to our campaign based on our efforts from this first campaign?

Project overview

1. Map current resources across the state one region- neighborhood- at a time, identify missing or lacking resources and build a strategic plan to drive economic development through entrepreneurship and innovation programs.

Will be looking at all programs from acceleration, academic, incubation, education, technology transfer, funding, workforce, and economic development and revenue growth will be taken into consideration and the strategy going forward will be based for the region and statewide on this data collected.

2. As the statewide strategic plan is built, all participating organizations will align to provide the following resources: entrepreneurial guidance, results orientated growth solutions, incubation systems, educational programs and events, capital funding solutions and operational support for small business owners, startups and scaling businesses.

Our goal is to be a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs seeking growth resources and who are lacking access to bank loans, angel and venture capital and unsure where to turn.

Never a dull moment here! We are excited about our growth and next steps and hope you are too!

Sana and I would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for this initial support and hope you will consider supporting us on our Illinois initiative.

We would also appreciate your sharing our work and project with friends who you think might also want to support us.

GlobalGiving has a girl fund that is about to launch Feb 28th and your support would greatly be appreciated.

Lisa and Sana

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Nov 26, 2018
Pie for Providers and Soon to Be Released Big News

By Lisa Canning | Founder & CEO

Hi Everyone!

First of all, we hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

Unbelievably Positive News

Since we last wrote, we have had some unbelievably wonderful events transpire that are enabling us to build a large-scale partnership for the benefit of startups and those seeking to raise funds across the state of Illinois. This partnership will put Florence Hardy, CEO of truCrowd-IL at the center of it.

However, due to the timing of the press release, we are unable yet to tell you anything more about it other than to say it brings with it a 75 million royalty matching fund that will help entrepreneurs get funded based on return on sales and take no equity, as well as a seed fund that will launch in 2019. As soon as the press is released, we expect it later this week, we will create another project update and send it to you. Unfortunately, this report with GlobalGiving was due and could not be postponed any longer so Stay Tuned!

4th Female Founder

On another great note, we have yet another female founder we have just on-boarded, our 4th. We are working with, Chelsea Sprayregen, CEO of Pie for Providers. Pie for Providers has created business software that supports child care businesses by streamlining their government facing administration. They help with the child care subsidy, income & expense tracking, and licensing & accreditation to ensure child care providers get paid faster.

1/5 of your funds are being donated to them to help them create a strategic sales plan.

Once it is done, our work with PIE will help them execute against that plan by developing their sales capabilities, testing and defining their sales processes, creating content campaigns around keywords to communicate more effectively to prospects and close more sales faster. While they have received some investment, they need more to further develop their app. Chelsea and her all-female team are learning quickly and we are excited to see how quickly they are able to progress as a result of our efforts.

More to Come

We are truly thankful to all of you who have supported us and who care about seeing women find the funding support they need to grow their businesses faster. We are proud of our all-female team and especially proud of the progress we are making.

Lisa and Sana

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Mar 29, 2018
We just crossed the finish line and now the work begins.

By Lisa Canning & Sana Tariq Khan | CEO and Co-Founder of Sana's Kitchen

From our heart to yours

Dear Friends,

We wanted to take a moment to celebrate our success. We just crossed the finish line with less than 24 hours to go. This means we will also officially 'graduate' from the Global Giving Accelerator Program. YEAH!!!!!!!! We could not have done it without you! It means so much to Sana and I that you have supported us on our journey. We can't say THANK YOU enough!

During the campaign we received another piece of good news. A key partnership we had been working towards is coming to fruition with our friends at the FUND Conference/ Venture Connects. We expect to partner with them to help early stage founders raise capital through crowdfunding by fall.

With that in mind, we still need more applications for more female founders to begin the work of preparing them for a raise. If there are any you think are ripe for our support, we would really appreciate it if you would share this application with them. We hope to have them selected by the end of Q2. We are looking for those who need smaller sums of money: 50K-250K.

Here is a link to the application:

https://iaeou.formstack.com/forms/scholarships_for_female_founders_global_giving_spring_2018

On that note, Lisa will be moderating a panel for Fund Conference- Austin on April 25th for 5 female VC's. We hope between the connections she makes there- with the over 100 startups attending who are seeking additional support and funding- that we will find a few more to participate. We have vetted and accepted only 1 to date. LumenCache.

Thanks again for your belief that our future is brighter with helping more female founders to rise and shine. Helping them bridge the investment gap is critical to their success. Thank you for recognizing it and contributing.

every good wish,

Lisa Canning & Sana Tariq Khan

CEO, Sana's Kitchen, Co-founder

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