Women Helping (Mostly) Other Women

Three women. Three different organizations. Same big goal: help aspiring and current entrepreneurs develop and expand their businesses.

The two Women's Business Centers of Kansas and Missouri have just opened this Fall, making Kansas City the only metropolitan area with two such centers to assist women entrepreneurs throughout their respective states. The Entrepreneurial Growth Resource Center at UMKC, which works with both men and women, has recently received additional funding from the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, allowing the addition of a work-study internship program.

Goals are just words until they're put into action. The women in charge of the action and attaining the goal are Sandy Licata in Kansas, Dr. Joni Padur in Missouri, and Dr. Patricia Greene at UMKC. The three share a similar passion: making entrepreneurs successful through support of all kinds including research, education and mentoring, through creating appropriate networks, through finding and managing appropriate financing.

With women owned businesses entering the market at nearly twice the average rate of three years ago, and with over nine million women owning their own businesses according the National Foundation of Women Business Owners, women face "a special constellation of needs" according to Padur.

Licata agrees, saying, "The businesses are not growing in revenue appropriately. Women lack the access to networks, education, and capital. They have few role models. These long-term programs will help solve those issues."

The three women are enormously articulate about their mission, and clearly enthusiastic about the path that brought them to Kansas City and their current vocations. Patricia Green, previously director of the Rutgers Center for Entrepreneurial Management, is an avid researcher who focuses on the identification, acquisition and combination of entrepreneurial resources for women and minority entrepreneurs. She says that the research, combined with the programs and assistance of her organization, helps her, too, because she knows that she's making a difference.

Joni Padur likes the fact that her organization aids women, especially those from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, overcome whatever obstacles they face in order to achieve - a theme dear to her as a cancer survivor. When she moved here in 1986 to pursue her degrees in clinical psychology, she never thought she would be putting them to use, along with her extensive performance and service delivery background and consulting experience, in helping women by serving as a powerful resource for them.

Sandy Licata says that she doesn't know anything other than small business She bought her first business, a plant store, in 1979 when she was 20. Moving from Wichita ten years ago, she already had a history of buying and selling various companies. She says she's done the same three things all her life - consulting, teaching, and running a business - and they've all converged at the Kansas Women's Business Center. Now that business is a non-profit and, "It's the best of all because I'm having so much fun - I'm doing what I love - watching women grow and become economically successful!"

A great example of how these three women, and their organizations, work together for the benefit of all is the ATHENAPowerLink™ program which helps women-owned businesses expand profitability through the use of professional advisory panels. The program is a cooperative project of The ATHENA Foundation, the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, as well as the organizations previously cited. The program, says Dr. Greene, "takes a selected group of business women to the next level by expanding their access to expertise in areas of business development and networking." Three women. Three organizations. One worthy goal.