According to Washington Women’s Business Center (WWBC), women owned businesses have increased by 28.5 percent in the Seattle metropolitan area in the last 12 years. Nationally, however, women account for only 16 percent of conventional small business loans, and women seeking first-year funding receive 80 percent less capital than their male counterparts.
As a board member of WWBC and a passionate advocate for women entrepreneurs, Kristina Maritczak is familiar with those statistics, and she intends to help change them.
For the past two years she’s been developing a project called, the Women’s Business Initiative specifically designed for Tacoma.
“The goal is to create an economically favorable ecosystem to support women owned businesses,” she says. “We want to have a positive impact on our community through providing women with support for education and the resources to start companies.”
The first step was putting together a committee comprised of a cross-section of the community to explore existing resources, identify gaps, and look for ways to collaborate.
“There are lots of women’s foundations,” says this entrepreneurial founder of Maritczak Legal Group. “We’re not here to create something instead of them. We’re here to create something out of the resources that are already here and supplement them with whatever we think needs to change.”
See the full article HERE written by South Sound Business in November 2017.
