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The Tsunami Is Growing!
Calendar of Upcoming US Events
Project Tsunami and its US partners and
supporters are organizing a series of high-impact
national initiatives focused on women’s
entrepreneurship, designed to spur economic
growth and job creation.
These national events are collaborations between
Tsunami, the Kauffman Foundation, and our
Collaborative Partner, the National Women’s
Business Council, plus one or more additional
organizations for each event.
The US will host three experts roundtables in
2004 on key issues of concern to women’s
entrepreneurship. Each provides a rare opportunity
for collaboration among national leaders, including
entrepreneurs, top government officials, senior
corporate executives, leading researchers and
academics, and NGO leaders. Each event is
designed to develop knowledge, and will meet the
following objectives:
Small enough to facilitate conversation, large enough to create impact
Emphasis on conversation, not presentation
Content-focused
Participant-driven
Action-oriented, designed to develop solutions
February 18 - New Strategies for Increasing Women
Entrepreneurs’ Access to Corporate, Government
and International Markets, an experts roundtable
hosted by the U.S. Department of Commerce in
Washington, DC
April 8 - Women Entrepreneurial Education and
Training, an experts roundtable hosted by the
Georgia Tech DuPree College of Management at
their state-of-the-art Technology Square campus in
Atlanta
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April 28 - The High Growth Entrepreneur
Roundtable ~ Building Global Policy for Women’s
Entrepreneurship, an experts roundtable hosted at
the Stanford University Faculty Club in Silicon
Valley, California
Results from these experts roundtables will have
both national and global impact. To request
information about event sponsorship and visibility,
please contact info@projecttsunami.org.
Calendar of Upcoming International Events
Women’s entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as
an important economic driver by national
policymakers. To advance knowledge about this
sector requires sharing best practices and
connecting key leaders, including policymakers,
experts, corporate and financial stakeholders, and
women entrepreneurs themselves.
April 5 to 23 - The Trilateral Virtual Summit on
Women’s Entrepreneurship, among relevant
ministers, policymakers, experts, NGO leaders and
women entrepreneurs, from Canada, the UK and
the US. The Trilateral will launch with a
videoconference among participants in
Washington DC, London and Ottawa. After the
videoconference, Trilateral participants will
collaborate over the Internet on the key strategic
issues that can fuel women’s entrepreneurship.
British, Canadian and American best practices and
case studies will be shared, enabling the three
countries to learn from each other, and not “have
to reinvent the wheel.”
First week of June - OECD Istanbul meetings:
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) Ministerial Conference of
Ministers of Industry and Small and Medium
Enterprises (85 countries), who will discuss four
strategies to spur economic growth and job
creation, including women’s entrepreneurship,
Business Symposium on information and
communications technologies (ICTs),
Global Marketplace expo with ICT firms, and
The Women Entrepreneurial Best Practices
Forum, an experts forum where results of all of
the previous events from Spring 2004 will be
presented to national and international
policymakers, entrepreneurs, business executives
and experts, representing up to 85 countries and
many international organizations.
In addition, Project Tsunami will host a series of
online forums from February through May in order
to enrich the face-to-face discussions.
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(Left to right) Julie Weeks, Executive Director
of the National Women's Business Council
(NWBC) in the US; Tsunami CEO Virginia
Littlejohn; Tijen Aybar of the US Department
of Commerce; Elizabeth Vazquez, Tsunami's
Executive Director; and Aileen Kishaba of
the NWBC at one of numerous meetings at
the Commerce Department to plan the
experts roundtable on Access to Corporate,
Government and International Markets on
February 18th in Washington DC.
About Tsunami
Project Tsunami, Incorporated
(www.projecttsunami.org), is a non-profit
corporation based in the United States that
is a global accelerator for women’s
entrepreneurship. It was designed to help
create a tidal wave of economic
opportunities in the US and abroad, by
identifying and connecting key women
entrepreneurial leaders, facilitating the
sharing of best practices across countries,
and helping to link effective programs with
resources. It uses 21st Century technology
to make a clearinghouse of resources and
best practices available to its powerful
global network of leaders and multipliers,
who then disseminate this information
widely to their members and stakeholders.
The organization began its work with a major
seed grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation, which funds innovative
programs that foster entrepreneurship.
Tsunami is an outgrowth of two major
international conferences on women-owned
small and medium enterprises put on by
the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) in Paris in 1997
and 2000, for which Tsunami’s CEO Virginia
Littlejohn served as Senior Advisor. Project
Tsunami influences policies, practices and
programs that expand the WE sector by
concentrating on 6 core strategies:
1) WE research, data and statistics;
2) Entrepreneurial education and training;
3) Access to finance;
4) Access to networks and to corporate,
government and international markets;
5) Technology as an entrepreneurial
enabler; and
6) Constituency building and advocacy.
We are also anaylzing how these areas
impact high-growth women entrepreneurs.
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