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Date: 10/24/2023
NORTHAMPTON — A “trail map” illustrating the location of women and nonbinary-owned businesses in the greater Northampton area was unveiled during a special ceremony in front of Spill the Tea Sis Home + Gift on Oct. 17.
The event at 177 Main St. was spearheaded by The Sphere, an organization of women and nonbinary entrepreneurs that finds different ways to support other women and nonbinary entrepreneurs.
“The Sphere was created to directly provide solutions for barriers to success for women entrepreneurs,” said Megan Allen, a co-founder of The Sphere and founder of The Community Classroom. “When you’re looking at drivers of economic success in towns, women hire more, they put more money back into the local economy and their businesses tend to grow faster. So, we’re looking at how The Sphere can be an economic driver for Northampton, Leeds and Florence.”
Background
On May 10, the Downtown Northampton Association received $200,000 to support The Sphere and all the present and future work involved with the movement, including bolstering an entrepreneurial ecosystem and sparking entrepreneur-led economic development throughout Northampton.
According to Amy Cahillane, the executive director of the DNA, although Northampton has a rich and welcoming history of the female entrepreneurial spirit, there are still gaps that need to be addressed.
“Access to funding and capital, work/life balance and continuing education can all be difficult for female-identifying entrepreneurs to find and use effectively,” Cahillane said. “We have a wealth of experience and skill within our female entrepreneur community and small business support networks but have lacked the capacity to bring this community and these resources together under one umbrella.”
To address these gaps, many women entrepreneurs have spent the last several months talking with others in the community and completing their own research to determine where those intractable issues are in the women and nonbinary entrepreneurial sphere.
The Sphere was borne out of this prior research, where over 15 business owners were interviewed during a preliminary process known as The Resilient Project, on which Reminder Publishing reported back in April 2022.
Allen said that three major barriers to women’s entrepreneurial success were identified through this Resilient Project research. One barrier was a lack of support for women entrepreneurs due to intersectional identities, like racism, sexism and ageism. “All the -isms,” as Allen described it.
The other barriers found in the research include a lack of access to resources and time, according to Allen.
The goal was then to use that research to help close these gaps and create a network of women and nonbinary entrepreneurs who can share resources and talk about their own experiences in the community.
The trail map
Part of that research and data-collecting included creating a “trail map” that highlights women and nonbinary-run businesses in the greater Northampton area. The map is part of The Sphere’s strategic plan to connect and support these entrepreneurs by creating an easy way for people to access these businesses.
“From [The Resilient Project], we realized that there were a lot of businesses owned by women in Northampton, but we did not exactly know where they were,” Allen said, of the early research process two years ago.
According to Allen, there was only “squishy data” at best but most of the data pertained to brick-and-mortar businesses. With the map now unveiled, women and nonbinary entrepreneurs can now seek out connections in a quick and easy way since the data now includes physical storefronts and cloud-based businesses.
Thanks to a grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and a collaboration with the Arts Equity Group, The Sphere was able to create a campaign known as the “GetOnTheMap campaign,” to gain insight into the community.
From that collaboration, Allen said 270 people responded to the campaign, which helped The Sphere put together the map and digital database of women and nonbinary entrepreneurs in the area. A little over 50 businesses are included on the physical map alone. Allen said some entrepreneurs from outside of Northampton, including one in South Hadley, also responded.
The map was designed by Alexis Design in Northampton, which is owned by principal designer Alexis Neubert, a web and print designer of over 25 years. Neubert spent several years working for corporate publishing and ad agencies in New York City, working on ad layouts for major publications like Fortune and Time Inc. magazines.
“As a Northampton women business owner, it’s always a pleasure and an honor to work with the other women and nonbinary business owners,” Neubert said. “It was truly a pleasure to work on this ... there are in fact so many businesses that need to be included on the map, and I imagine there will be many more.”
City Councilor Rachel Maiore, who was in attendance at the unveiling, said she was “so impressed” with The Sphere’s ability to gather this additional data.
“The creating of The Sphere network is the creating of information about who we are, how we can grow and how we can lift each other up,” Maiore said. “You know where we are now because of the data and the survey so we can get to where we want to go.”
The map was unveiled at the “Navigating Wellness Salon.” The Salon events are community-building networking opportunities providing a haven for female and nonbinary entrepreneurs to congregate and share their experiences. The Sphere has hosted a few of these events in the past, as well.
The map is located next to a vacant storefront next to Spill the Tea Sis Home + Gift.
Readers can learn more about The Sphere by visiting their website: https://spherenorthampton.com/. According to the website, entrepreneurs can still enter their information to be included in the next round of recognized businesses for the map.
Readers can also learn more about The Sphere and their goals by visiting Reminder Publishing’s prior coverage: http://archives.thereminder.com/localnews/northampton/the-sphere-supports-local-entrepreneurs-in-northam/.