The Commonwealth Institute launched its inaugural Women of Ethnic Diversity Initiative with a breakfast meeting on April 14th at the FleetBoston Financial Office in Boston. It was a dynamic group of 150+ women from all ethnic backgrounds. The event was sponsored by FleetBoston Financial and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

June Rokoff, Co Founder and President of The Commonwealth Institute gave the welcoming remarks. The mission of the Women of Ethnic Diversity Initiative is to connect women entrepreneurs of ethnic diversity in order to create community, address any unique business challenges faced by them, provide access to previously untapped networks, and to further empower them with the resources they need to grow their businesses. The four pieces of work that enable them to execute this important mission are unique outreach, community building, knowledge transfer and business enhancement.

The panelists consisted of Dr. Radha Jalan, President and Chair of ElectroChem, Inc., a leading-edge research and development company for the fuel cell industry, Donna Gittens, CEO of Causemedia, and Fran Oh, Chairperson and CEO of Electronic Business Solutions, Inc. Donna talked about how her company recently won a major contract with the Democratic National Committee for the upcoming convention in July. Fran discussed her efforts to successfully partner with Sun Microsystems. Fran’s company had a strong partnership going for 10 years with Sun until 2001 when she received a letter from Sun indicating that they were terminating their partnership with her company. With nothing to loose and an attitude not to give up, she started attending their meetings, interacting with Sun executives and as she said it, “After 8 months of battle and negotiation she was once again able to rebuild the partnership with Sun as a leading systems integrator in Massachusetts.”

“Here are the projects we work on, I don’t know what they mean but I hope you do,” were Radha’s first comments at a meeting with NASA. Radha took over the company three weeks after her husband’s unexpected death in 2002. Instead of selling the company, Radha took on the challenge to change her career from being an educator to being a CEO. Once again, with nothing much to loose, she learnt the art of entrepreneurship and partnership leading to a $ 4M grant from NASA. Her biggest challenge since has been to protect the IP rights for her company. “It is always a battle and winning them is what entrepreneurship is!” says Radha.

Besides that, the discussion focused on some of the other challenges faced by people as a result of their gender/color including “There is no second chance to make the first impression.” In order to succeed it is essential to build mutual trust, share values and commit to excellence. Finally according to Radha, “Not only it is important to ‘Brand’ what your product is, but it is equally important to brand ‘Yourself’”.

Some of the other Indian American women registered at the meeting were Sumita Basu, Nirasha Jaganath, Manjula Kandasamy, Nishtha Limbachiya, Pooja Panwani, Geeta Ramamurthy, Nila Rankit, Ameeta Soni and Madhu Sridhar.

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