Heather Kerner s pizza dough company, the Good Crust, doesn t produce a tech product, but she enrolled in Propeller earlier this year anyway. The six-week course is designed to guide women as they build their tech or tech-enabled business, and she figured gaining those skills was an important part of getting her Maine-sourced pizza dough out to the market.
Now, two months into running her Skowhegan-based business, she s secured several wholesale accounts and is poised to consider a distribution partnership.
Kerner s startup is one of six generated from the program, which was launched in March by the CEI Women s Business Center. Two sessions were held this year, in March and again in July. A new round begins in January, with two sections behind held simultaneously, one on Tuesdays and one on Wednesdays. The course if free and conducted completely online.
A summer internship program launched this year by Maine s three largest law firms and the University of Maine School of Law to move the needle on diversity will be even bigger next summer with more employers joining the initiative.
The Maine D1L Diversity Summer Associate Program got off the ground this summer at Bernstein Shur, Pierce Atwood and Verrill, each of whom hosted two first-year law students from throughout the country.
One of the participants this summer, Jireh Davis of Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law, did a Pierce Atwood virtual internship from her home state. She told Mainebiz she hopes to get to Maine in person someday and help pioneer Maine in the diversity and inclusion sphere.”