The Charleston Regional Business Journal
Jan. 13 - Jan. 26, 2003

By Kelly Love Johnson, Managing Editor

The Charleston-based Center for Women is gearing up for its 10th annual Centering on Women conference, scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 1 at the College of Charleston’s Lightsey Conference Center.

For the past 10 years, the Center for Women has planned and sponsored the conference as a way to provide personal and professional development opportunities for women in the Lowcountry. In addition to a keynote speaker, the conference includes workshop sessions on a wide variety of topics of interest to women. The difference this year? Most of the workshop sessions focus on business and entrepreneurship for women.

“ In the past year, the Center for Women has seen a huge increase in interest about issues affecting women in business and women entrepreneurs,” says CFW executive director Jennet Robinson Alterman. “The programs we have offered during the year, such as the brown bag lunch series and special events, have resulted in record attendance. The feedback we have received indicates that working women want more resources to help them do their jobs and live their lives.

“As a result,” Alterman continues, “we chose to highlight the woman entrepreneur at the 2003 conference.”

A December study by the National Women’s Business Council reports that even though women-owned businesses represent 38% of all U.S. businesses and are growing at twice the rate as all other firms, women received only 5% of the almost $9 billion dollars in venture capital invested in 2000. Access to capital consistently ranks as one of the biggest challenges for women entrepreneurs seeking to start or expand their business. The NWBC emphasizes the need for training programs to educate women on methods of obtaining capital and reports that programs designed specifically to address the needs of the community are particularly successful.

In addition to workshops such as “Heart Callings: Health and Hormones” this year’s conference will feature business- and employment-focused sessions, such as “Transitions for the Entrepreneurial Woman,” led by Dorothy P. Moore, professor of entrepreneurship at The Citadel; “Girls Just Want to Have Funds,” which will feature a panel of financial planning experts; “Starting Your Own Business,” a panel of representatives from small business resource agencies moderated by Liz Taylor of the U.S. Small Business Administration, and “Managing Difficult Conversations,” led by Linda Netsch, attorney and lecturer, Harvard Law School.

Keynote speaker Darla Moore, partner in private investment firm Rainwater Inc., will speak on “My Life as a Woman in Business.” Moore is affiliated with a number of corporate and nonprofit boards of directors, such as Magellan Health Services Inc. and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In addition, she serves on the South Carolina Governor’s Commission on Teacher Quality, the Chamber of Commerce Excellence in Education Council and the Commission on Higher Education Business Advisory Council. Moore is also one of the founders of the Palmetto Institute, which aggressively promotes business development in the state.

Moore’s alma mater, the University of South Carolina, is the first comprehensive university to name its business school—The Darla Moore School of Business—after a woman. Prior to joining Rainwater Inc. in 1994, Moore was a managing director of Chase Bank. Her career has been the subject of many feature articles in business publications including Fortune, Forbes, Working Woman, Worth and The Wall Street Journal as well as a CNN profile. Alterman says she expects record attendance for this year’s conference “between 250 and 350,” as the CFW “has seen a 100 percent increase in the number of women we have reached this year over 2001.”