Entrepreneurship offers women a place to realize their dreams. There’s nothing more empowering than taking a vision and making it manifest in the form of a business that serves and/or provides opportunities for others.
Kristen works with women entrepreneurs in all phases of their business from the idea to the exit strategy. Entrepreneurial endeavors can be very lonely; hours behind a desk, in front of a screen, on the phone working tirelessly every day to make stuff happen. Especially in early phase start-ups, direct human contact can be limited.
As your coach and/or consultant, Kristen will be your partner in creating strategies, problem solving and accountability to help relieve the me against the world mindset. She gets it as she’s been there.
Kristen’s Entrepreneurial Journey
In June 2005, Kristen resigned from her position as a television executive at Paramount Pictures to pursue one of her life long dreams of working with African women. Two days after clearing her desk, she found herself in the Kenyan bush in a place called Samburu, just north of the equator. While there, Kristen had the opportunity to travel throughout the region meeting hundreds of women, learning about their extraordinary lives. Their stories were all the same. Every women in this community faced the daily struggle of finding clean drinking water.
With a passion for women’s empowerment, Kristen knew that without access to clean water these women would never have the opportunity for independence or equality. This revelation inspired the creation of The Samburu Project. She knew that she couldn’t solve all of the challenges these women faced but was confident that she could take steps to a provide clean drinking water as a foundation to community development and women’s empowerment.
Three months later, she returned to Los Angeles and incorporated The Samburu Project, a nonprofit organization. In its first 12 years, The Samburu Project, has provided clean, drinking water to over 80,000 people which directly provides tens of thousands of women and girls the opportunity for empowerment.
While she is incredibly proud of her accomplishments, in the early years, it was a very lonely journey with no staff, an uninvolved Board of Directors and working from home. Though it was the realization of a dream, the work was a struggle. Trying to figure it all out on her own was gut wrenchingly stressful and laden with anxiety. This notion alone is what inspired Kristen to work with women entrepreneurs in hopes that it makes their journey a little easier.
Kristen Kosinski 