2025 Year-End Amber Grant Awarded to Cranberry Oysters

WomensNet is pleased to announce the recipient of its 2025 annual $50,000 Year-End Amber Grant.

Lauren Gray, based in the Cranberry Isles, Maine, won the April 2025 Amber Grant, and is the founder of Cranberry Oysters.

Take a few minutes to be inspired by her interview with Marcia Layton Turner about her business growth this year and her plans for the year-end grant.

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi everyone. My name is Jama, and I am on the board of WomensNet. We are so excited to introduce to you our 2025 year end winners. Our winners are all ones that won a monthly $10,000 award, and now we’re here celebrating because they’ve won $50,000! And so we’re so excited to introduce our Amber Grant winner. Thank you for carving out some time today to be able to talk to us about what you’ve been doing, and what you’re going to do with the $50,000! Lauren, will you please remind our network about your business? And I just want to say that Lauren was our April, 2025 winner.

Lauren: I have Cranberry Oysters. It’s a five acre oyster farm run by seven women. We’re three miles off the coast of Maine in the cranberry isle- a town of five islands. A very special place. We’re growing oysters and hopefully soon providing farm to table sea tours for our oyster farm.

Jama: Thank you so much. So we want to know now what you have been doing this past year since winning your award. Can you please tell us how you’ve used your award, how it’s helped your business, or even a story about how things have been going this past year?

Lauren: It’s been a big year. When I received the $10,000 Amber Grant in April, I had outlined a plan to up our volume by getting a cold storage facility set up and also launching farm to table sea tours. So I kind of launched in and did the thing that I could most immediately with the $10,000- which was to get a captain’s license. So I became a captain, and then I also had to purchase a huge insurance package to be able to bring people out on the water. So I got a huge liability insurance package and then started work on that cold storage facility and getting the licensing rolling (since that was a year long project). So we’re in the middle of that. I was able to find some additional grant funding to purchase some of the equipment there because that $10,000 went really quickly!

Jama: Doesn’t it?

Lauren: Yeah. It was a very exciting and just one thing after another.

Jama: Tell us how will this $50,000 will help you to move further. I know you have some really exciting initiatives that you’re gonna be launching there!

Lauren: The application process helped us think bigger and most importantly, it really helped get our message out there for women on the water, and women in aquaculture. People were so supportive just saying like, “wow, this is so cool, this oyster farm, with all women working.” And so following in that message, I want to support women on my crew getting their captain’s licenses. So I’ll have at least two women obtaining their captain’s licenses this winter. And also to support that upscale in volume, we’re putting a deposit down on an additional hundred thousand oyster seeds, and we’re also gonna go for a solar barge. So not only women run, but solar powered!

Jama: That’s pretty incredible! I’d love to come out with you one day!

Lauren: Absolutely. And we’ll be offering tours so you can!

Jama: That’s right, very cool. And so there you have it. Our 2025 year end winners!. Please check out these businesses- they’re amazing. They’re doing awesome things, and track them as we will be in the year and seeing how they are doing. Thank you, thank you, thank you!