Local entrepreneur Dawn Miller is being recognized for her role in the founding of an organization that just marked 25 years of financing, training and mentoring women business owners.
The Women’s Enterprise Centre (WEC) was established in 1995, with funding from Western Economic Diversification – the same federal government organization that supports Community Futures.
The organization’s 25th anniversary was celebrated in Vancouver on March 4, just ahead of International Women’s Day.
Back in 1995, Miller, now 71 and living on the Sunshine Coast, was a business consultant and educator in Prince George and saw first hand the obstacles women entrepreneurs were facing.
“I’d been working a lot with women entrepreneurs and I knew what the challenges were,” Miller told Coast Reporter. “We did have Community Futures, but their lending model was quite traditional and many of the women couldn’t meet those criteria.”
Miller said a common example was needing to have assets in their own names to qualify for a loan. “Many married women at the time didn’t have assets in their own name, so they needed a co-signer. Or they were single and they didn’t have sufficient traditional assets for a loan.
“There was a study done in Winnipeg at the time that came up with the result that these were barriers to women entrepreneurs.”
Miller said that study caught the attention of the federal minister in charge of Western Diversification and the agency started holding focus groups to explore ideas that could help remove those barriers.
When Miller saw an ad in the local paper asking for input on a new initiative for women entrepreneurs, she responded with “a multi-page letter outlining the issues in north-central B.C., saying these are critical issues if you want women to be involved in entrepreneurship and developing businesses.”
That letter led to an invitation to join one of the focus groups, and an offer to become WEC’s first chair.
Miller told Coast Reporter that when the Women’s Enterprise Centre started it had $5 million in loan capital, and about the same amount spread over five years for start-up, administration costs and other work.
“We had a lot of flexibility to look at things – but we knew what was needed. We needed access to capital, we needed loans, we needed mentoring and training. A lot of men are mentored and trained along the way in the businesses they’re in, but at the time women were not being mentored and trained in the same way,” Miller said.
“One of the reasons women became entrepreneurs was because they couldn’t progress in industry and work because of the glass ceiling. They couldn’t go any further so they would pop out from under that glass ceiling and start a business instead.”
Miller served as the founding board chair for two years and as a director for three years, and she said those first board members weren’t sure WEC’s five-year mandate would be extended, but the program was a big success.
“It’s amazing. As the board, I don’t think we could ever have imagined what’s happened. It’s been huge… It has just incredible reach,” Miller said.
In its first 25 years WEC has provided over $72.2 million in financing to women entrepreneurs which, the agency said, has created more than $2.17 billion in economic activity and helped create or maintain more than 4,300 jobs.
In 2019 alone, WEC provided training and mentoring to over 4,300 women entrepreneurs in 134 communities throughout the province.
The WEC’s Sunshine Coast clients have included former Gibsons councillor and founder of PowHERhouse Media Charlene SanJenko, Daphne Woo of Amacata Design Concepts in Gibsons, Lorelee Wotherspoon of Lorelee Lane Farms in Roberts Creek, and Alice Ward Cameron of Alice’s Fresh Pasta in Powell River.
Miller said she thinks WEC has a strong future as well, fuelled largely by the success of the entrepreneurs themselves. “If the women who get the loans are successful and able to pay back the loans, and if you can point to successful women across the board, I think governments like it. We like it. Communities like it. I think that’s why it continues on – there’s a total belief that it’s worthwhile.”
