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Emmie Faust

Top Entrepreneurship Voice | Exited founder | Building community @ Female Founders Rise | Mum of 4 | Follow me for daily posts about entrepreneurship

Emmie Faust, a seasoned entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, transitioned from consultancy to focus on empowering female and non-binary founders through her community, Female Founders Rise, which boasts over 6000 members.

Female Founders Rise offers a supportive network through meetups, office hours, Q&A sessions, and advocacy for female entrepreneurs, with a vision of achieving financial freedom for women in entrepreneurship.

Emmie's background includes successful ventures as a founder and angel investor in numerous women-led businesses, demonstrating her commitment to supporting and scaling enterprises led by women.

She holds a BSc in Economics with Accounting and Law from the University of Bristol and has been actively involved in various organizations aimed at empowering entrepreneurs, particularly women, through mentoring, advising, and investing.

Highlights

Sep 2 · linkedin

PS 📣latest update just in Innovate UK has now confirmed that they will fund all 50 Women in Innovation awards, meeting the original £4m commitment.

Innovate UK has broken its promise to female founders for the final time. We can't and won't stand for this anymore.

The ‘Women in Innovation Awards’ promised that 50 female-founded and female-led businesses would receive a £75k grant and package of support, from a funding pot of £4 million. 1,452 women applied for the award; but only 25 awards have been granted. Assuming each grant is £75,000, this is a total of £1,875,000. This leaves £2,125,000 unfunded at present.

📢 This isn't good enough. We're calling for change

Let's Fund More Women is urging Innovate UK to: 💰 Commit to fully utilising the remaining funding and awarding the 25 grants 🗣️ Engage in dialogue with us to address the issues raised and implement necessary reforms 🔎 Acknowledge the shortcomings and review the process  🚀 Launch a redesigned award program for 2025, with more funding committed

Join the Let's Fund More Women movement. ♻️ Repost this post Write to your MP. Put the pressure on.

If you’re one of this year’s unsuccessful applicants, please complete our survey>>> https://lnkd.in/eGMNQRqB

This was first brought to my attention by a post from Emma Jarvis sharing the situation. We promoted this award in our community Female Founders Rise so I felt confused and shocked that many of our members and other female founders would have spent hours (during school holidays) and often money on applying.

It's been a busy time for many since first hearing about this on Friday but hats off to Tara Attfield-Tomes Becky Lodge Zandra Moore and many more women and men who have worked tirelessly over the weekend to get this sorted.

Follow Emmie Faust for daily posts on entrepreneurship and female founders

The power of the collective coming together to create change - well done ladies and gentlemen ❤️

Sep 1 · linkedin

Deep upset in the female founder community

Innovate UK awards only 25 of the 50 awards

♻️Repost to share

Update that I heard back from them on Sunday afternoon and I will share more shortly.

Innovate UK is the United Kingdom's innovation agency, which provides money and support to organisations to make new products and services. And recently they launched a special campaign to support women.

According to applicants, who heard back on Friday, only 25 of the 50 awards have been released.
Understandably everyone is very confused and upset to hear that only half of the funding has been released.

↳ Around 1500 women applied - that's a huge number.
Many of these are in Female Founders Rise as we promoted the award to our members.

Applying for these grants takes SO much time (average 40 hours) and many founders also pay for support (sometimes up to £10K)

So I tracked down the CEO of Innovate UK on Friday (whilst on the train back from Cornwall) got their email and have emailed them to ask for more clarity on what is going on and what they plan to do.

This kind of thing undermines trust. When everyone is working together to support female founders this is not the news we want to hear.

If you applied for Women In Innovation 2024 Please tell your story here via the form; we need to know what went wrong and how and we will use this data to take to IUK it will be anonymous. Please share on your feeds as well to encourage other women to sign up and give feedback. >> https://lnkd.in/eGMNQRqB

Will report back when I hear more

Ps I first read about this on Emma Jarvis’s post and Hattie Willis who told me what was going on. Since then been tagged in by lots of female founders who have been affected. Emma and Tara and Zandra and Becky Lodge are all good people to follow to be kept up to date on what is going on 👋

Sending love to all those who applied and didn’t get the news that they were hoping for ❤️

Emmie Faust
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Location

London, England, United Kingdom