Consultancy

WOMEN INTO BUSINESS


Birgit works with women starting, developing or thinking about starting a business. Her enthusiasm and extensive knowledge and experience of this area are matched by an excellent rapport and a very personal touch. As well as her academic qualifications, she has her feet on the ground: a natural in the kitchen, in the garden, and with people of all ages and backgrounds. Confidence generated by success is combined with empathy and understanding to provide long-lasting motivation. She simply meets her clients and customers where they are.

A successful entrepreneur

She is herself a successful social entrepreneur, and an exemplar of a new breed of female-led micro-businesses which are transforming the landscape of work and blurring the boundaries between lifestyle choices and earning a living. Her creativity in making ideas happen and translating her wide range of skills into business reality is impressive. No one could doubt her ability to prioritise her varied workload. Her commitment to sustainability and equality shines through everything she does. She is a quiet champion of a very practical feminism, enabling women to transform their lives rather than shouting from the roof tops.

A business development practitioner

Dr. Birgit Kehrer has a long history as a business development practitioner. Her work at Breathing Space Ltd (a charity helping people into self-employment) from 2004 to 2007 focused on women, and helped Breathing Space achieve the Prowess Flagship Award for Women’s Enterprise Support. While there she started a local women’s business network and developed women-only capacity building workshops. She was successful in raising further funding from the Regional Women’s Enterprise Unit. She was responsible for setting and meeting targets, monitoring and reporting activities and evaluating impact to the strict standards of EU EQUAL funding. In fact she has a long-standing experience in delivering EU programmes and projects. Equally at home in Britain and Germany, she has an excellent good ability to connect with different European partners and ensure smooth relations. From 1999 to 2004 she was a tutor and organiser for an EU funded Leonardo da Vinci programme.

Her doctorate and experience equip to undertake qualitative social science research of various scales, and she is particularly interested in issues relating to gender, ethnicity, women’s enterprise, social enterprise and healthy living.

She has a special interest in developing best practice in business support for women, who are often ill-served by services designed by and for men. The Prowess Flagship Award provides a route map for such practice, which could well be useful for men too. Birgit has been in dialogue with European partners regarding Prowess’ interest in ‘translating’ the Flagship Standards into different national contexts.

Birgit has worked with…

  • Women’s Enterprise Centre of Expertise (WECOE)
  • Prowess in relation to the Prowess Flagship Standards
  • Sandwell Women’s Enterprise Development Agency (SWEDA)
  • Women’s Business Development Agency (WBDA)
  • Social Enterprise West Midlands (SEWM)
  • Women in Rural Enterprise (WIRE)

Examples of work undertaken:

  • Capacity and confidence building workshops
  • Skills audits
  • Introductory enterprise courses
  • Building women’s business networks
  • Research

Summary of achievements

  • Founding and developing BSustained as a social micro-enterprise with a flexible, multi-tasking attitude.
  • Achieving Prowess Flagship Award for Breathing Space Ltd.
  • PhD in Human Geography at Sheffield University in 2006 (thesis on German women and their attitude to race and nation)
  • MSc ‘Society & Space’ Bristol University 1994
  • Organised a very successful ‘Women into Business Mainstreaming Event’ at the Chamber of Business in Birmingham November 2007
  • Working as freelance caterer (including weddings with 200 guests) since 2000

In addition, Birgit studied Media Enterprise at Birmingham City University (2007-2008) – a course which encouraged her to direct more of her energies into her own enterprise and to launch BSustained.

Please contact Birgit to discuss what she could offer you or your organisation.

You can read what Jo Burrill (a former business adviser at SWEDA) had to say about Birgit as an entrepreneur here. References available on request.

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