By Tammy J. Arquette, Esq.

We know that investing in women makes good business sense, whether that be in promoting women within a company, supporting women owned businesses, or supporting local programs that benefit women.  Women play an important role in every aspect of business locally and globally.  

Women are business owners, executives, employees, producers and consumers. As such, empowering women presents an incredible opportunity for business to improve the lives of people making, selling, and buying products. 

As a woman owned business, there is a struggle not only to be successful in business, but to manage time and resources in a way that allows us to also support our own, our family and our community needs. 

We think of work-life balance as a balancing of our work time with our family time, but it is also a balancing of our community investment time.  How can we do it all?  How can we make the best of our current resources and commitments in order to make the biggest impact on those community needs that are most important to us?

Volunteerism and community activity can be done in a way that maximizes our personal, business and volunteer goals.  Joining with existing local programs and organizations can make this possible.  Involvement with local programs and organizations, whether that be by joining a board, becoming a member, volunteering with programming, making financial contributions to their programs, advertising during their events, participating in their external events, and sharing their messages on our social media, are all ways to combine our investment in our business,  our self and community.  

By Christine Graf

Clifton Park physical therapist and massage therapist Laura Brown is on a mission to help chronic pain sufferers eliminate their need for opioids. According to the National Institute of Health, 25 million Americans suffer from daily chronic pain and lack effective non-opioid treatments to manage that pain.

“I want to get people off the opioids and the narcotics. You can’t live on that stuff and you shouldn’t have to,” said Brown. “My mission is to give people a little bit of their life back.”

In order to help patients suffering from chronic neuropathic and oncologic pain, Brown purchased an $80,000 FDA-approved pain therapy device called a Calmare. The device delivers gentle electrical stimulation, and clinical studies have shown that its technology successfully reduces pain in more than 80 percent of treated patients without the adverse side effects commonly associated with drugs. It is not effective in treating pain caused by inflammation.

Brown first learned about Calmare from one of her massage clients, a physician whose daughter found relief from chronic pain after receiving Calmare pain treatment therapy. Intrigued, she set out to learn more.  

“I saw that it didn’t just have a bunch of advertisements,” she said. “It had clinical studies and publications. Johns Hopkins uses it, the Mayo Clinic uses it, VA centers across the country use it.”

Because she is a physical therapist, Brown met the medical standard requirements necessary to become a Calmare practitioner and was able purchased the device in December 2019. Just as she completing the necessary training, the COVID shutdown forced her to close her office for three months. Since reopening, she is working to spread the word about the revolutionary pain treatment therapy she offers. 

By Susan Elise Campbell

Jane Chen left Wall Street to start a writing center for youth in a career leap that surprised her peers in the world of investment banking. But helping children read and write is something Chen has been devoted to since she was 16 years old. 

Her business, Eyre Writing Center, was launched January 2020 from Saratoga CoWorks and Chen has already helped 900 middle school children “take the mystery out of writing well,” she said.

“At the end of my time in asset management on Wall Street I was writing a curriculum for a new writing center for the new age,” said Chen, whose parents named her after The literary character, Jane Eyre. “My task was to break down the foundations of writing and make it a science.”

The center would focus on middle school students because “we have great elementary schools and, depending on the district, great high schools,” she said. “But middle schools are underperforming so it is difficult for students to jump from eighth to ninth grade. When I saw what books were on the recommended summer reading list for seventy or eighth grade, I realized I had these titles on my reading list in fifth grade.”

She said she doesn’t know exactly what is behind the drop in basic skills, it was “aggravated by COVID,” she said. “I don’t look at data to see where the problems may lie, but I know anecdotally that there has been a deterioration in the quality of writing.”

As Chen edited college essays on the side she was “learning what the students weren’t learning. Switching tenses, poor sentence structure and punctuation are fundamentals that should have been addressed 10 years earlier,” she said.