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:
“Let us not succumb to nature. We will marshall the clouds and restrain tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations; we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up, and give vent to the dangerous gas; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out. We will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth. We will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. It is time we looked into these things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I declare
Two lineages electrify the air,
That will like pennons from a mast
Fly over sleep and life and death
Till sun is powerless to decoy
A single seed above the earth:
Lineage of sorrow: lineage of joy....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“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)