D.C. is well-known as being number one for women entrepreneurs. And a new initiative backed by Mayor Muriel Bowser is looking to keep it that way.
Launching today, "BEACON: The DC Women Founders Initiative" aims to work with businesses, investors, government officials and mentor programs to bring more resources and opportunities to women entrepreneurs in the District. Think of it like DCFemTech, an umbrella organization for D.C.'s inclusive tech meetups, but more proactive. Mayor Muriel Bowser's office also plans to dedicate grant funding to organizations that provide support to women founders in D.C.
"We don’t want to reinvent the wheel," said BEACON board member Anna Mason, of the Vinetta Project and Revolution. "We want to find out what is being done already and how can you create a magnifying effect by finding out how you can pool efforts that are already underway."
In addition, BEACON is planning a workshop series supported by the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown Law and sponsored by Google to learn more about the challenges and needs of women entrepreneurs in the District. Which makes sense—how are you expected to grow if you don't fully understand the needs of a community, argues Shana Glenzer, a member of the BEACON board.
"Our goal is to, first and foremost, make sure that we truly understand what the community and business owners and leaders want, so we're not creating programs in a vacuum," Glenzer said.
The idea for the BEACON came at a dinner over the summer. Glenzer and Mason talked with a few people there about women entrepreneurship in the District. Then the Mayor's office got involved in the fall.
"It started this discussion that it is good for the D.C. economy and good for business if women are successful at sustaining and growing these businesses," Glenzer said.
But if D.C. is already considered one of the best for women in entrepreneurship—in 2016, personal finance company SmartAsset ranked the D.C. metro area as the best place for women in technology—then why start a whole new initiative for it? Because, simply, there's always more work to be done, Glenzer says.
"While it’s great and we like to celebrate when we’re put on these lists, the goal here is to amp that up even more," Glenzer said.
The launch of the initiative comes at an important time for D.C.'s women in tech community, especially. With the presidential election at the beginning of the month, many female tech leaders have been worried about how President-elect Donald Trump's presence here will alter D.C. inclusive tech environment. Many women tech leaders have urged people to buckle down and continue working.
With that idea, something that Mason is excited for is the opportunity this initiative is creating for women entrepreneurs to network with each other and get to work. In her role as Revolution's Director of Investments for Rise of the Rest, Mason has toured a few different American cities and tech hubs, and she sees the same problem: not enough people in the business world know the people they should know.
"There's a lot happening that each of us don’t know about, people probably don’t know each other, so how can we know that," Mason said. "One of the powerful steps from today is getting everybody in the room together."
The initiative officially kicked off at a roundtable at the MakeOffices in Dupont today. About 50 people attended the roundtable discussion, and the Mayor's office released its 2016 Pathways to Inclusion report.
"It’s not so much about getting into the weeds of the workshops or the roundtable," Mason said about the roundtable kickoff. "I think that all of that will come together and there’s a simplicity of people coming together."
Image used via CC BY 2.0 — credit #WOCinTech Chat
