Youngstown, Ohio is a smaller city on the outskirts of Ohio that has circulated entrepreneurial ventures in and out of storefronts for decades. A company called the Youngstown Business Incubator developed a program they like to call the WE Program, short for Women in Entrepreneurship. The WE Program “creates economic opportunities for women through entrepreneurial education and training, mentoring, and networking.” Their focus specifically on women branched from a mission to promote “minority-owned enterprises,” which they hope will bring personal and community growth.
The WE Program emphasizes three phases – WE Create, WE Launch, WE Grow – that women can apply for, according to whatever stage in the entrepreneurial startup women find themselves. The WE Create phase is a “four-week program that offers four workshops and educational sessions to help women who are ready to enter the world of entrepreneurship but need help developing an idea.” This phase is for the imaginers, the ones who have the ideas but have no clue where to start and need some structural workshops. The WE Launch phase “includes ten weeks of classes that teach the fundamentals of owning and operating a business.” The primary focus of the WE Launch phase is to take already-started businesses and aid them in launching their product or service into the market. The WE Grow phase, phase III of the Accelerator Program, “gives women four weeks of marketing strategy and tools to grow their existing businesses.” Each phase has an application that can be completed on the Youngstown Business Incubator website, and any woman can apply. Each program applicant is reviewed and applicable to win a grant award from each program, which has significantly changed the course of many women’s businesses within Mahoning Valley. Check out the program for yourself!
Find the website here: https://ybi.org/we/
One morning in 1993 an 8-year-old girl named Abbey Fleck and her dad were cooking bacon for breakfast. as she saw her dad’s struggle with all the bacon fat juice and cleaning it up with paper toils, she thought of an idea. What if there was a way to cook the bacon hanging as a dish of some sort collects the fat? That’s when Abbey and her father began to design what would eventually become the Makin’ Bacon dish. It’s a square, inch-deep skillet made of microwave-safe plastic. It has 3 T-shaped supports rising up from its center. The bacon cooks while draped over the crossbars of the central supports and the fat drips down into the dish.
