Support Queer and Female Owned Businesses in Leeds

Hi,

Please help me support small businesses in Leeds. I need to buy the equipment I need and pay for some of my time to be able to offer reduced rate marketing and content creation to queer and female business owners receiving universal credit and/or paying for childcare and/or living with disability.

My Story:

My name is Ella I am a Holistic Therapist - in 2021 I opened a female empowerment studio which aimed to help women and queer folk find a "safe" place within wellness. Since then it has slowly become a business all about accessibility and inclusivity in wellness spaces and in 2024, after the birth of my second little one I started offering parent and baby classes to support the mental health of parents and help them build a community.

Although my offering was really good, I was struggling to find the time around family life and limited childcare to promote myself and I realised how many business owners have the same problem. My classes often had spaces available that I didn't have the time to try and fill.

In Summer this year I started a Whatsapp community group in Leeds to try and help small businesses who run parents and child classes fill more spaces in their sessions and help parents and carers easily discover what is on around them. I knew it was needed but I had no idea how much, the community boomed very quickly and now we have over 650 members.

What I noticed through this journey is that there are so many wonderful small/indie businesses who are experts in their craft but struggle to promote themselves, and with such big start-up overheads and often the juggle of family life and childcare costs it is really difficult to prioritise spending money on marketing.

Something that has always benefited my business is my background in marketing and social media, I just haven't had the time to be my own marketing manager on top of everything else.

I would love to be able to help indie businesses with their marketing, build websites, create physical marketing collateral and help them develop a back catalogue of content they have for their own social media. AND I would love to be able to offer this at a reduced rate to business owners like me who are on universal credit and don't have the means to really hit the ground running with their own business.

Really, I want to empower queer and female business owners with the tools to market themselves.

What I need to buy:

Camera equipment

Editing software

Photography short-course

Covering my time:

This work takes a lot of time, my plan is to use some of the funds to cover my time so I am able to offer the work at a hugely reduced rate to the businesses who qualify

How the Community will Benefit:

I will offer 5 free content building sessions to indie, female or queer owned businesses in Leeds who pass certain criteria in Leeds

For the first 6 months I will offer any female/queer owned businesses a "pay what you can" rate for all content and marketing creation

From 6 months onward I will offer a sliding scale or alternative on all my work to ensure it is always accessible to people who need help.

I hope you will donate. Thank you so much

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