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The Nurture Network Community…
Nurture Network is a networking hub hosted by Lemon Quarters for UK-based female professionals and entrepreneurs across all ages, sectors, regions and at all stages of their business journey.
The purpose of the Nurture Network is to give all women in business a seat at the table.
The central pillar of Nurture Network is a roundtable event that brings women together to share their business experiences, support, and mentor each other and network. It is an informal, off-the- record conversation.
After the roundtable event, we select attendees to be interviewed for Nurture Network – Find Your Business Voice podcast. This podcast is aimed at helping small business leaders grow their audience, customers and business through content, and for The Short-Cut; 10 quick fire questions to give you a snapshot into some of our Nurture Network member’s working lives.
These outputs are creatively and tactically shared via social media – Instagram, & LinkedIn and on the Nurture Network website. There are also additional skills development content for all to consume and share.
Nurture Network typically addresses the following key issues: diversity within organisations; creating business opportunities for women in leadership roles; addressing the current skills gaps; and increasing networking/mentoring opportunities.
There is one corporate commercial partnership slot available quarterly. We want to help corporates build on their diversity, equity and inclusion agendas, support women in their industry and build a talent pipeline. We want to work with corporate partners to help grow and develop the network.
Why have we set up Nurture Network?
Lemon Quarters want to celebrate and promote the contribution of brilliant women, who are ordinary people within everyday businesses (who have frequently been overlooked).
The aim is to provide a platform, give voice and to creatively share their stories and their path into business/ leadership. The promotion of excellence will have a knock-on effect and impact & inspire others as to the possibilities within the world of business.
Women are underrepresented among entrepreneurs and business leaders. They make up 51% of the UK population but only 17% of business owners. At the same time that female talent remains largely untapped by the business sector, organisations are fighting a talent war. More than half of UK businesses say the time taken to fill average vacancies is longer than five years ago, largely due to a lack of skills, according to the British Chambers of Commerce.
Nurture Network will help to address this current skills gap and the lack of diversity and inclusivity within entrepreneurship and senior leadership in business. Open to all women in business, regardless of age, sector or location within the UK, it seeks to inspire a generation of female leaders and entrepreneurs.
So what’s different?
Our ‘open to all’ participation criteria makes Nurture Network unique among groups of this kind. Women at all-female networking events are usually of the same experience level, within the same region and sector. These networks are membership-fee based. We want to disrupt this standard formula, bringing more diverse groups together to allow for a more innovative cross-fertilisation of ideas. We also want to give women these personal development opportunities for free.
What has inspired us?
Lemon Quarters was founded by two female co-founders, Kelly Baynes and Marie-Claire Frederick.
We have seen first-hand many capable, talented women who have not been afforded the same opportunities for career advancement as their male counterparts
Myself and my co-founder Marie-Claire Frederick were inspired to set up Lemon Quarters, in part as a response to the limited career opportunities afforded to us as working parents. We looked for opportunities that provided us with flexible work patterns and acknowledged the role that we played as mothers and were compatible to our lived realities, but none existed. So we set up Lemon Quarters to help our clients foster real conversations with their audience and which also helped address our need for flexibility.
In our main role as founders of a content marketing agency predominately serving the Financial Services, FinTech sectors, we speak with and work with many women and all too often have heard of many stories of career setbacks and obstacles at all levels. We want to champion and support women in their professional careers and development through Nurture Network
Next steps? We held our first virtual roundtables towards the end of 2021 with brilliant women from the world of finance and fintech. They were incredibly candid and honest “off the record” chats amongst peers on their careers to date and the challenges and opportunities that they have faced. They also helped each other with advice and support.
We ran podcast interviews to delve deeper into these women’s journeys. These are available to listen to here and more episodes are released every couple of weeks. We also asked some attendees to answer a little quick-fire questionnaire, called The Short Cut. You can find these here.
We are holding virtual roundtables throughout 2022. To join us in the network. Just email me
Kelly@lemonquarters.com or to become a corporate partner please contact us here
