SEED
Whilst in California, Franks developed the idea of SEED, an acronym for Sustainable Enterprise and Empowerment Dynamics, as a model for using principles of femininity, sustainability and social responsibility in business. In 2000, Franks published The SEED Handbook: The Feminine Way to Create Business, a guidebook for female entrepreneurs, detailing a values-based approach to creating and running sustainable businesses. Franks launched the book at the Bloomingdales store in New York, which devoted an entire window display to it, and it has since gone on to sell more than 50,000 copies in the UK and US alone.
Franks has since published two more books. In 2004, she published Grow: The Modern Woman's Handbook, a guidebook aimed at helping women to get in touch with their feminine power. This was followed in 2007 by Bloom: A Woman's Journal for Inspired Living, an accompaniment to a set of Affirmation Cards released previously.
In collaboration with Tribal Education, Franks developed the SEED Women into Enterprise Programme, a blended learning course for self-employment. Aimed particularly at women from marginalised and disadvantaged communities around the UK, the programme has been delivered through local government agencies, training companies and charities - including Croydon Enterprise, A4e and The Prince's Trust - as well as to inmates at Eastwood Park and Styal prisons.
The SEED project has continued to grow with workshops and training events held around the UK, online resources and exclusive, week long retreats held regularly by Franks at her own home in Deià, Majorca. Local SEED Circles have started up in many areas to provide members with opportunities to network with like-minded business owners in the community, whilst accredited SEED Coaches provide mentoring to new businesswomen starting out. In 2009, she launched the SEED Community Site, a social networking website to connect women entrepreneurs around the world.
Read more about this topic: Lynne Franks
Famous quotes containing the word seed:
“one seed becomes
An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.”
—Jean Toomer (1894–1967)
“We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“The ancestral deed is thought and done,
And in a million Edens fall
A million Adams drowned in darkness,
For small is great and great is small,
And a blind seed all.”
—Edwin Muir (1887–1959)