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Enterprising Rural Women - North West Tasmania Swinburne University of Technology and University of Tasmania

We Invite Your Contribution

I am writing to invite your contribution to a new project to strengthen support for enterprising women in Tasmania. The Centre for Social Impact Swinburne (CSI-S) at Swinburne University of Technology is currently working with six organisations in North West Tasmania to undertake this project.

We will be holding workshops on:

  • Thursday 5th April at 5.15pm in Ulverstone (Apex House - 3 Gollan Street)
  • Wednesday 2nd May at 5.15pm in Ulverstone (Apex House - 3 Gollan Street)
  • Thursday 3rd May at 5.15pm in Smithton (Agritas - 12 Nelson Street)

And, we invite you to come and provide your feedback, insights and perceptions around the question:

What support is required to enable enterprising rural women in North West Tasmania to turn their ideas into action?

Using this information, we then aim to co-create an enterprise development support program to improve enterprise opportunities for women long-term. Three workshops will be held initially with 10-20 individuals in each. Workshops will run for approximately 120 minutes.

For more information on the project itself please contact Robyn Eversole: +61 3 9214 5379 or reversole@swin.edu.au (and/or scroll down this page).

For more details about the workshops and/or to register please contact Jodie on 0438 923 049 or visit switchtasmania.com.au to register (click on the link to your left or the button/link below to go to the website).

The Project

The purpose of the Enterprising Rural Women (North West Tasmania) project is to better understand what kinds of support are currently available and lacking for enterprising women in rural North West Tasmania, in order to strengthen institutional supports for enterprising rural women. The Enterprising Rural Women project will work with current and prospective women entrepreneurs, the organisations that aim to support them, and business development stakeholders to co-design an enterprise development support program that will meet the unmet needs of enterprising women in rural North West Tasmania. At present, enterprise development supports have been successfully developed in Australian capital cities, but little is known about the specific supports that rural women need to build their enterprising capacity.

Overall, it is anticipated that this project will improve the coordination and activity of North West Tasmanian organisations that support women entrepreneurs, and provide the foundations for ongoing good practice in the development of future institutional enterprise development supports. This project is being funded by the Collier Charitable Fund.

Participation

Your participation will involve a face-to-face workshop with other participants. It is anticipated that workshops will take approximately 90 minutes. We seek your verbal consent to take notes during the workshop and take photographs of non-identifiable visual materials (for example, whiteboard notes).

Questions will include items such as:

  1. How do you perceive your opportunities to start or grow enterprises in North West Tasmania?
  2. What kinds of enterprises do you seek to grow and why?
  3. What kinds of resources and support do you believe are available for enterprising women on the North West Coast?
  4. What do you think is currently lacking, and how do you believe existing resources could be better leveraged to enable more enterprising rural women to turn their ideas into action?

Your participation in this project is entirely voluntary. If you do agree to participate, you can withdraw from the project without penalty at any time. Your decision to participate or not participate will in no way impact upon your current or future relationship with Swinburne University or the Collier Charitable Fund. You are free to refuse to answer any question we ask.

Information and Consent Forms

To obtain these, please contact Robyn +61 3 9214 5379 or reversole@swin.edu.au

For more information about the workshops, please scroll down.

The Workshops

The exercises in the workshops will be practical and revolve around your business idea/s. To help us understand your enterprise story or business idea (or the problem to solve as you see it), we ask you to please consider bringing in an item/s with you.

Ideally the item/s will illustrate:

  • your current idea or stage of development in your thinking (or the problem as you see it, or a potential gap in the market)
  • your interest and motivation behind starting an enterprise (or solving a problem)
  • your enterprise goals and plans (or your early thoughts)
  • any challenges or successes you have experienced (or foresee if you are just starting out with your idea)
  • who you are as a person (e.g. values and attributes/characteristics)

Items may include, for example:

  • Product sample
  • Photographs
  • Prototype
  • Flyers
  • Sketches/Mindmaps/Diagrams
  • Diagrams/Sketches/Mindmaps
  • Timelines
  • Journal entries/notes/poems
  • Videos or Podcasts
  • Marketing materials (e.g. posters or poster drafts, advertisements for social media, or draft ones)
  • A name for your enterprise (or any ideas for a name)
  • A mission statement for your enterprise (or a tagline) – or draft ideas

The artefacts that you bring in, should help you talk about your idea, or the problem you would like to solve as they act as a tool for communication.

Sentence starters, for example:

Some of you may have general ideas and hence prefer to come along to talk about those (without any artefacts) – and we absolutely welcome that too! We just ask that you think about the following ‘sentence starters’:

  1. This is the opportunity/problem I see…
  2. This is what I have done so far…
  3. This is where I hope to be in 6 months’ time…
  4. This is what I need to get me there…

Interested?

Call Jodie on 0438 923 049. And/or visit the Switch Tasmania website to register:

When you register for the first workshop, information and consent forms will be emailed to you but if you need to know more about the project (including information sheets and consent forms) before registering then please contact Robyn +61 3 9214 5379 or reversole@swin.edu.au

Mentoring and Support

During the very first Enterprising Rural Women Workshop in early April, the group, headed by Faith Puttman, set up a network and mentoring collective called "IGNITE NORTH WEST WOMEN". The group have regular face-to-face sessions, which they organise on Facebook in a closed group (i.e. Enterprising Women North West and Associates). The women also share information about a range of things through the Facebook page as sometimes not everyone can attend the face-to-face sessions. The Facebook front page looks like this:

To join the Facebook Group (and be informed about upcoming activities and events with other female entrepreneurs in a regional area), please hit the button below:

Please note that you will be asked a few questions when you click on the button above to join Ignite as it is a closed Facebook group. However, it wont take long to be connected!

Chief Investigator/Project Manager

Professor Robyn Eversole | Deputy Director | Centre for Social Impact Swinburne Faculty of Business and Law | Swinburne University of Technology | PO Box 218, Mail H23, Cnr John and Wakefield Streets | Hawthorn VIC 3122 Australia | +61 3 9214 5379 | reversole@swin.edu.au

Credits:

Created with images by 童 彤 - "Notebook in a basket" • Angeleses - "png bicycle trim" • Annie Spratt - "Axe & wicker picnic basket on a tree trunk"

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