Management Program to Aid Women Owners
The U.S. Small Business Administration on Wednesday announced that it is launching a management assistance program in California to help women who own businesses.
The pilot program, called Women’s Network for Entrepreneurial Training, will be introduced in Illinois and New York later this year, said Carol Crockett, director of the SBA Office of Women’s Business Ownership. If successful, the program will be expanded nationwide.
“There is a great need for long-term training and counseling for women business owners today,” Crockett said. “It also calls attention to women who have been successful and need and want to now give back but don’t know how to do it.”
The program is starting small with 12 mentors--successful women chief executives from various industries scattered around the state who will counsel 12 “proteges.” Names of potential proteges will be submitted by local SBA offices.
Neither the mentors nor the proteges will be paid, Crockett said.
“The government is acting as a catalyst,” she said. “It’s not costing the taxpayer anything.”
The year-long program, which will begin operating in November in California, will be much like the SBA’s existing management training programs called SCORE, or Service Corps Of Retired Executives, and ACE, or Active Corps of Executives.
Margaret Torme, one of the 12 mentors, said no such training programs existed when she co-founded a San Francisco public relations firm in 1979 or when, four years later, she opened a firm bearing her name.
She said she wanted to participate “because I don’t think that women have a good organizational support system in business and what there is isn’t as constructive or as ingrained as for men.”
“You have to pay back,” said mentor Penny L. Kerry, who owns PNI Omnitects, an architectural and design firm in San Francisco. “Someone helped me a million years ago and I think it’s up to me to help someone else along.”
The program was announced Wednesday in Los Angeles at the fourth annual Governor’s Conference on Women in Business, which drew about 2,000 people.
