Je Suis Boutique
Paige Jones
http://www.je-suis-boutique.com/

Je Suis Boutique is an eCommerce platform founded by Paige Jones. Her boutique hosts an online shopping experience with a collection of unique start-up designers who are looking to get their foot in the industry.

Elu, LLC
Christina Marshall-Valdez

The Elu brand is for women who want their curves to cascade into styles that inspire confidence. Elu’s style shop at YourElu.com will soon offer gorgeous styles that can be made-to-measure to highlight everything beautiful about a womens body.

Pop Fizz Weddings
Elizabeth Means

Pop Fizz Weddings is a party planning company that Elizabeth started with her mother after planning her own wedding. Recently she has started developing the idea of “Pocket Weddings.” Pocket weddings are smaller, more streamlined, and more affordable than traditional weddings. By cutting out the traditional venue, seated dinner and winnowing down the guest list, her idea of Pocket Weddings can save clients tens of thousands of dollars.

FGS&Co.
Pamela Baer
website

FGS&Co. was a founded by Pamela as a “gifting is giving” shopping platform where every individual shopper is a community contributor and every purchase makes a socially responsible impact.

The majority of the platform vendors are local or global artists that give back to the community, earn a fair living wage through their craftsmanship, and strive to make a difference through their product. On top of that at least 25% of proceeds from every purchase made through their site goes back to a worthy cause or charity.

Under the Sea LLC
Barbara Whitman Howell
website

Under the Sea is an all inclusive glass bottom boat tour in Hawaii for people of all ages and skill levels. Barbra’s team offers many different types of tours so that people can enjoy dolphins, whales, reefs and even sea turtles with their families despite their ability in the water or physical limitations.

Under the Sea also has their own to research program for bioluminescence, which has been proven to detect marine pollution and has driven huge advantages in medicine.

As always, thank you for reading! Remember we award a grant every month – if interested, here’s the link to apply!

Stay tuned: We will be announcing the winner very soon!

Nido Durham, LLC
Tiffany Frye
website

Nido Durham is a quiet space for coworking and childcare combined for parents. While parents are in their own workspace, their children are a door away in a Montessori classroom doing their own creative work. Along with childcare, Nido is a community with events to support each others professional and parenting interests and just to get to know one another.

Brobe International
Allison Schickel
website

The Brobe is a robe with a built in bra attached to it. The Brobe is a robe designed for breastfeeding mothers or women undergoing any breast surgery, such as mastectomy, reconstruction, breast augmentation, or reduction. The Brobe is fashionable yet functional and can be used in many different occasions throughout different stages in a woman’s life.

Spectrum Works
Ann Marie Sullivan
http://spectrumworks.org/

Spectrum Works is an innovative social enterprise employment model born out of the idea that individuals with autism deserve an opportunity to have a productive, fulfilling life. Their unique approach gives people with autism the opportunity to show society that they are capable of producing high quality goods and services.

Kheyti
Saumya
Website

Saumya’s company, Kheyti designs, adapts and implements low cost farming solutions to help growers increase yield and predictability of produce. Their goal is to offer small farmers a seamless path towards income increase.

Yellow Scope: Science Kits for Girls
Marcie Colledge
website

Yellow Scope was founded in 2014 by scientists and moms, Marcie Colledge and Kelly McCollum. Marcie and Kelly met in 2008 at their children’s elementary school as volunteers running the school’s STEM programs. After realizing how well they work together they decided to Yellow Scope was born. Yellow Scope’s goal is to make rigorous and creative science kits for girls.

Honorary Finalist

MmMorgan’s Custom Cakes and Desserts
Morgan Hodnett
website

MmMorgan’s Custom Cakes and Desserts was founded by a 14 year old girl as a way to share her passion for creating beautiful cakes with others. Her entrepreneurialism and passion for baking at such a young age is so impressive, that we couldn’t not add her to this list. Check out her facebook page to see some of her work!

As always, thank you for reading! Remember we award a grant every month – if interested, here’s the link to apply!

Stay tuned: We will be announcing the winner very soon!

Girls At WORK, Inc.
Kathleen Hannabach
website

Girl at Work is a not-for-profit that provides girls with a safe and supportive environment to step out of their comfort zones and to build with other girls. Not only do they discover how capable they are, they also discover how exciting it is to work as part of a team toward a common goal.

The Safe Baby Co.
Amber Kroeker

In 2013 Amber returned to her office with a heavy heart after reviewing the deaths of two babies who had died from an unsafe sleep environment which made her realize she needed to do something. So Amber started researching and came across a program in Finland which provides maternity packages to all women who give birth in that country. Before the program was implemented, Finland had the highest infant mortality rate in the world. They now enjoy the lowest, in part due to the maternity package. The special thing about this package is that the box doubles as a safe sleep space for babies.

The baby box Amber is trying to create is an environmentally friendly, recyclable, inexpensive and portable sleep space.

Imaginary Universe
Diane Beam

The Imaginary Universe is A Science book and film on the subject of physics and modern cosmology and Diane’s experience working with UK scientist Stephen Hawking. She is the author of the book in progress and the director, producer and co-author with Stephen Hawking of the documentary, non-profit, feature film.

The book is about her collaboration with world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking which began more than two decades ago. At the heart of the book are the events surrounding our work, script-writing, and filmmaking in the UK and USA.

The SMART Playbook
Suzanne Wind
Website

The SMART Playbook was founded by Suzanne Wind a mom of three. The SMART Playbooks plan is to offer families a simple and effective game plan to teach relevant life skills like manners and social skills.

Metamenu LLC
Natalie Neumann
website

Metabrew is a five-ingredient powerhouse of antioxidants and superfoods for long-lasting and slowly released energy. The foods used to make Metabrew are ethically sourced – making it easy for your body to convert the ingredients straight into brain power. Metabrew restores your body’s base mineral levels – leaving you feeling happier and healthier.

XOI, Inc.
Linh Tran
website

For decades, the Gac fruit was used in a festive sticky rice (xoi gac) that is eaten during Vietnamese New Year celebrations and weddings. This dish serves as the inspiration for the company name, XOI– both as a reminder of the fruit’s origins, and as a denotation of the joy experienced at occasions where xoi gac is served.

XOI’s aim is to bring this celebration to you through natural Gac fruit products and to the ethnic minority farmers that XOI works with.

As always, thank you for reading! Remember we award a grant every month – if interested, here’s the link to apply!

Stay tuned: We will be announcing the winner very soon!

After much debate amongst our Advisory board we’ve narrowed down our Amber Grant Finalists to Two. Congrats to Stretch Recipes and Hammerstone School of Carpentry for Women. Here’s a little bit about each of their businesses:

Stretch Recipes
Lauren Foster
Website

Growing up Lauren lived in a low income household without the tools to learn how to budget for groceries or prepare healthy meals. Because of this she always thought, why not build a tool that will help people maximize their hard earned dollars and have access to more nutritional recipes.

In November 2013, Lauren began looking more into the problem and seeking help to pull it off. In March 2013, she began landing partnerships with the SNAP program and local food banks in an effort to ensure the application would work for even the tightest of budgets as well as time strapped & busy singles and families.

Stretch is currently in the process of creating an app that will help allow shoppers to enter their budget, choose their meals, and automatically receive their shopping list with coupons. Stretch also hosts cooking class experiences to teach people how to cook on a tight budget.

Hammerstone School of Carpentry
Maria Klemperer-Johnson
Website

Hammerstone School of Carpentry for Women was founded by Maria in 2012 when a friend of hers presented the perfect project to organize her first official class: a tiny house.

After the success Maria had from her first class she quickly realized it opened the door to other opportunities, like a two-day introductory course to carpentry skills and a cider-press building workshop.

Maria ultimately hopes to expand the geographical reach of Hammerstone School so that more women from around the country are able to get an introduction to building in a safe and enjoyable environment.

We will be announcing our first $2,000 Amber Grant winner next week – Stay Tuned!

Voting has already begun for our next Amber Grant on our voting page. So please stop by there and read about our newest qualification grant winners.

WomensNet would like to thank everyone of you ladies in our WomensNet Community for another great year. We’re so excited to see what 2016 brings us. But, before we get too carried away we still have business to take care of from 2015. So, without further a-do here are our finalists for December’s Qualification Grant!

December’s Qualification Grant Finalists

Mott & Spry
Sarah-Eva & Ellen Marchese
Website

In 2011, shortly after Sarah became engaged, she set out to design a bouquet based on a Victorian language of flowers. She found it to be nearly impossible to do with the limited available resources available to her.

This gave Sarah the idea for Mott & Spry. Mott & Spry, Inc. is a company that believes it’s possible to apply your style to your flowers using technology and facts, and that that type of personalization makes the best type of design possible. It’s authentic to the flowers, and to your heart. Their goal is to help millions who know less about flowers than they’d like find and express their floral style.

Communicate for Life, LLC
Laura Frances Richardson
Website

Communicate For Life, LLC is a small business that offers private speech and language therapy and behavioral consultations for children in Berks County, PA. Through Communication For Life Laura offers free workshops on speech, language, and behavior development through Boscov’s campus of courses for parents of children 0-5, and through knowledge of her work. She is also one of the few speech-language pathologists that have had pursued a communication device for a 2-year-old.

WeTuition
Meixian Li

Wetuition.com is a company that provides highly interactive and innovative educational technology for online tutoring. The goal of WeTuition.com is to create more job opportunities for students and others, while offering affordable help to other students in need of a tutor.

Yummy Bazaar
Rebecca Chou
Website

Yummy Bazaar is an online and mobile platform that offers highly curated, delicious, authentic foods from around the world. Their ultimate goal is to become a shopping destination for the most delicious foods from around the world delivered through multiple formats and platforms including website, mobile app, as well as monthly subscription offerings.

InDependent
Michele Bradfield
Website

InDependent is a health and wellness campaign, fiscally sponsored by Public Health Foundation Enterprises, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Their mission is to create a thriving community of military spouses that supports preventative wellness by inspiring each other to make health and wellness a priority.

In-Dependent.org represents a lifestyle that promotes mindfulness about health. They offer interactive programs designed to encourage military spouses to take preventative measures in support of their individual health and well-being while they are part of the military community so they can thrive physically and emotionally.

As always, thank you for reading! Remember we award a grant every month – if interested, here’s the link to apply!

Stay tuned: We will be announcing the winner very soon!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving last weekend filled with family, friends, and food! I also wanted to take a moment to address how thankful we are for every one of you ladies in our community. You motivate and inspire us to continue what we do every day. Without further a-do here are our finalists for November’s Qualification Grant!

November Qualification Grant Finalists

LEARNtheBrand Impact Apparel
Monica Swope
Website

LEARNtheBrand Impact Apparel is a clothing line that consists of limited edition fashion T-shirts that includes unique designs that focus on rebranding the perception of learning and education from test-driven and habit memorization to meaningful, relevant and passion driven learning experiences. Their apparel demonstrates the collective belief of passion driven education, but a portion of the proceeds are donated to organizations that are providing meaningful learning experiences to learners of all ages.

One-OneThousand
Chelsea Koglmeier
http://oneonethousand.net/

One-OneThousand’s a place where handmade artists, designers, craftsmen and hobbyists can hone their skills in studio spaces and equipment rooms, sell their goods in pop-up stores, even learn how to build a business. It’s a place for stories about people making beautiful, practical things—and making mistakes along the way. Find classes, shopping, tools and supplies, creativity, community, time. At OneOneThousand, we’re making what we love.

Baked Cookie Company
Kristy McDonough
Website

Baked Cookie Company is a bakery based in Denver, CO specializing in classic drop cookies. Every one of their batches are always baked fresh to order- nothing is ever frozen or refrigerated. When you do order a dozen, a batch or even a hundred, these cookies are baked with you name on it and for no one else.

Alliance Music Therapy, LLC
Hilary A Fredenburg
Website

Alliance Music Therapy aligns music and treatment to reach optimum health, wellness, and functionality. Based on client-specific needs and personal strengths, they create musical interventions to treat cognitive, developmental, physical, emotional, and social needs.

Suzies Bed and Breakfast
Suzie Shumway

Suzie plans to open a Bed and Breakfast in the quaint town of Dickinson, ND. She will be the offering the usual B&B accommodations along with a host of unique experiences and fun for the whole family, which locals will also enjoy.

EnzymatiX Corp
Sayali Saykhedkar
Website

EnzymatiX is dedicated to producing cost-effective and efficient enzymes/enzyme systems for use in biofuels, paper and pulp industry, animal nutrition, starch and textile industries. They are involved in the discovery, molecular engineering, characterization and production of unique enzymes from fungus and other eukaryotic organisms found in nature.

As always, thank you for reading! Remember we award a grant every month – if interested, here’s the link to apply!

Stay tuned: We will be announcing the winner next week!

We want to thank everyone for being so patient this month and waiting for us to announce October’s finalists. So without further a do here are our finalists for October’s Qualification Grant!

October’s Qualification Grant Finalists

Asbury Farms Cider
Betsy Harris

Betsy has always enjoyed hard cider but would became frustrated that the mass market was offering cider as an autumnal and very sweet beverage. So she began home brewing to better suit her tastes. She enjoyed it so much, that she started Asbury Farms Cider. Asbury Farms Cider is a small, farm-to-glass brewery, which exclusively produces hard cider from apples on their farm.

Bikes ORO
Chelsea Koglmeier
http://www.bikesoro.com

Chelsea’s company, Bikes ORO is working to build a world of linked prosperity, where every individual has the ability to access educational opportunities, professional opportunities, and adequate healthcare facilities. For every bike purchased. They provide wheels for a bike going to someone in need.

Center for Creative Arts Therapy
Azizi Marshall
Website

After a few years of soul searching, Azizi stumbled upon an opportunity to do theatre with inner city youth. Through theatre she saw these kids grow, and learn about a world outside of their existence. They were able to give voice to their struggles and begin to form bonds with not only one another but also with the community.

From there she quickly began studying and obtained her license as a licensed clinical professional counselor, a board certified trainer in drama therapy and a registered expressive arts therapist within 4 years. Azizi wanted to make sure that children and families were able to have access to programs that would not only allow individuals a place to explore and grow, but also the community at large which is how The Center for Creative Arts Therapy was born. The Center for Creative Arts Therapy is an Arts-Based, Psychotherapy Practice and Training Center.

MOR & Co.
Sarah White
Website

MOR & Co. is the outdoor store for city living. Their mission is to help individuals in America’s fastest-growing cities reconnect with the outdoors through fun, high-quality products and empowering experiences (workshops, field trips and events) to inspire more outdoor play in our increasingly urban lives.

Foreign Languages for Kids by Kids
Kit Strauss
Website

Foreign Language for Kids by Kids started when Kit started creating her own games to play at home with her son in French. To her surprise, they were very fun and her son learned rather quickly. He even asked to learn Spanish and then a year later, Chinese. Kit found herself hiring native speakers and training them to play with her son using HER games. More than a decade later, all of her children share a love of foreign language and are proficient, if not fluent, in Spanish and Mandarin, despite two of them having speech-related disabilities.

After her youngest son went to school Kit decided to create her business Foreign Language for Kids by Kids. Her program gives children three and up — and adults — the opportunity to speak and understand spanish in a short time. The words and sentences taught are practical and used in everyday life.

Overcup Press
Rachel Bell
Website

Rachel has worked on and off in the publishing and book sales fields throughout her career. However, print has always been one of her passions – quality content, exceptional paper quality, well thought out and executed book and magazine design are all things that she considers important. As the world moves to a more digital space, she thought it’s important to continue to publish books that are meant to be physical objects which is how the idea of Overcup Press came to be.

Overcup Press is an independent book publisher based in Portland, Oregon. Committed to making books that will thrive in the 21st Century. They specialize in producing unique titles that have a strong design element and illuminate the niches.

As always, thank you for reading! Remember we award a grant every month – if interested, here’s the link to apply!

Stay tuned: We will be announcing the winner next week!

It’s been another crazy month here at WomensNet! A big thank you to everyone who applied this month- You made our decision very difficult!

So without further ado here are our finalists for Septembers Qualification Grant!

Septembers Qualification Grant Finalists

Batter Up! Cakes
Mary Carlson
Website

Batter Up! Cakes is a retail & special order bakery serving the Ligonier, PA and surrounding areas. Products are baked fresh to the customer’s need and all posted menus are general as many more items are able to be made to suit any event or any day treat.

Think Substance, LLC
Linda Montellano Werner
Website

Substance is a luxury hemp clothing line that creates the softest tee. It was created to fill the niche of hemp fashion in the U.S. Hemp requires no herbicides or pesticides, requires less water, is drought resistant and is the perfect rotational crop as it puts minerals back into the soil as it is harvested. Replacing cotton with hemp would be a major step towards a more sustainable future. Lindas super soft, eco friendly fabric, is a winning combination to put a product on the market that aims to heal the planet at all levels.

Mad Science of Greater Salt Lake
Laurie Larsen
Website

Mad Science is a leading science enrichment provider. Their innovative programs help kids learn about science through our fun after-school programs, preschool programs, in-class workshops, camps, birthday parties and special events.

50/50 Projects
Valarie B. Ross
Website

50/50 Projects is a company that offers products with a purpose. From their specialty t-shirts, children’s books, to bottled water. Each product is partnered with a certain giving partner and each giving partner is focused on one of 5 Projects; Clean Water, Early Education, Homeless Rehabilitation, Medical Care, and Global Missions.

Ivalieu
Cathy P. Kellon
Website

Cathy wanted to modernize the bloomers of old with new performance fabrics and thoughtful design details. So she designed Ivalieu with a wide yoke of a waistband that smooths but doesn’t try to squeeze you like you’re a sausage. You know, a waistband that respects you.

As always, thank you for reading! Remember we award a grant every month – if interested, here’s the link to apply!

Stay tuned: We’ll announcing the winner in the next few days!

Good afternoon and happy Monday!

We want to thank everyone for being so patient this month and waiting for us to announce August’s finalists. It’s been a busy last few weeks with labor day festivities, school starting back up, and of course reading through all the inspiring applications!

So without further ado here are our finalists for August’s Qualification Grant!

August Qualification Grant Finalists

Babyation
Samantha Rudolph
Website

Babyation has a re-imagined patent-pending breast pump that far exceeds any currently on the market. Their pump is quiet and our re-imagined form-factor allows a woman to keep her shirt on while pumping. The goal is to allow a woman to be able to pump inconspicuously – wherever she is. The experience is integrated with the user’s cell phone, allowing seamless control as well as an opportunity for “smart” data logging.

Honey Bear Paddle Co.
Kayla Farthing
Website

Kayla has launched a recreational equipment rental company that will specialize in canoe, kayak, and paddleboard rentals. Providing members of her community the opportunity to share her my passion of the outdoors, while offering a fun, healthy way to spend time with friends and family.

ShipRiot
Ginny Townsend
http://www.shipriot.com

ShipRiot is currently working ot become “the Expedia of shipping.” They’re designing a beautiful, easy-to-use site where consumers and small business owners can view all their shipping options on one screen and know that they’re making the best decision for their needs–generally based on either budget or speed.

HoneyMoon Brewery
Ayla Bystrom-Williams
Website

HoneyMoon is my female founded, Santa Fe based, brewery which utilizes both traditional styles of beer brewing and the kombucha style of brewing. HoneyMoon Brewing fits right into the growing Craft Beer Movement by offering traditional beers while also filling a gap in the market with kombucha style beers.

Responsiblr, Inc
Hsin-Ju Chuang

Hsin-Ju started Responsiblr, a bias-free hiring funnel platform because of a problem she constantly ran into at work – a lack of salary transparency & workplace diversity. He companies software anonymizes all resumes that are submitted before passing them over to an employer (and removes names and any indicators of age, gender, or race), then it provides an interface where job seekers can filter & view other anonymized resumes w/ salary figures so that they’ll know how their salary stacks up against real people in their city, w/ similar backgrounds.

As always, thank you for reading! Remember we award a grant every month – if interested, here’s the link to apply!

Stay tuned: We’ll announcing the winner in the next few days!