It's 2023! Is this the year you... Make your hobby a side hustle? Start your own business? Or work on taking your business to the next level?
The "Small Business and Side Hustles" newsletter is now monthly! That means even more opportunities to connect you to Library and community resources and programs to help you start or build your business!
March is Women’s History Month! This month's featured titles are full of practical advice and inspirational guides designed to help you achieve your goals — whether you're a #GirlBoss opening the door for future generations, a fledgling entrepreneur building your business, or a woman in the workforce looking to stand out.
Featured Resource: Kanopy
You can stream the world’s best films and award-winning documentaries instantly and for free with Kanopy from your library! Kanopy provides Jacksonville Public Library customers with FREE access to more than 30,000 of the world’s best films including some that are often difficult or impossible to access elsewhere. Watch on your computer, download the mobile app or stream directly on your TV.
Note: There is a limit of six play credits per person, per month, which resets on the 1st of each month.
Originally produced by Gravitas in 2019 and an official selection at the Urban World Film Festival, this documentary explores the passionate pursuits of Black women entrepreneurs. SHE DID THAT offers a peek inside the lives of Black women committed to opening doors for future generations.
Featured Books
Most business books provide a one-size-fits-all approach to career advice that overlooks the unique barriers that women of color face. In The Memo, Minda Harts offers a much-needed career guide tailored specifically for women of color.
Drawing on knowledge gained from her past career as a fundraising consultant to top colleges across the country, Harts now brings her powerhouse entrepreneurial experience as CEO of The Memo to the page. With wit and candor, she acknowledges "ugly truths" that keep women of color from having a seat at the table in corporate America. Providing straight talk on how to navigate networking, office politics, and money, while showing how to make real change to the system, The Memo offers support and long-overdue advice on how women of color can succeed in their careers.
Amoruso spent her teens hitchhiking, committing petty theft, and scrounging in dumpsters for leftover bagels. By age twenty-two, she had dropped out of school, and was broke, directionless, and checking IDs in the lobby of an art school—a job she’d taken for the health insurance. It was in that lobby that Sophia decided to start selling vintage clothes on eBay.
Flash forward to today, and she’s the founder of Nasty Gal and the founder and CEO of Girlboss. Sophia was never a typical CEO (or a typical anything). She’s written #GIRLBOSS for other girls like her: outsiders (and insiders) seeking a unique path to success, even when that path is windy as all hell and lined with naysayers.
Shark Tales is the inspiring true story of Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran--and her best advice for anyone starting a business. After failing at twenty-two jobs, Barbara Corcoran borrowed $1,000 from a boyfriend, quit her job as a diner waitress, and started a tiny real estate office in New York City. Using the unconventional lessons she learned from her stay-at-home mom, she gradually built it into a $6 billion dollar business. Now Barbara is even more famous for the no-nonsense wisdom she offers to entrepreneurs on Shark Tank, ABC's hit reality TV show.
A renowned expert in the women's leadership movement, Tiffany Dufu was once like so many other driven and talented women who have been brought up to believe that to have it all, they must do it all. But after she gave birth to her first child, she struggled to accomplish everything she thought she needed to in order to succeed. Dufu began to feel that achieving her career and personal goals was an impossibility. Eventually, she discovered the solution: letting go. In Drop the Ball, Dufu recounts how she learned to reevaluate expectations, shrink her to-do list, and meaningfully engage the assistance of others--freeing the space she needed to flourish at work and to develop deeper, more meaningful relationships at home.
The daughter of a scientist who frequently noted her lack of “genius,” Angela Duckworth is now a celebrated researcher and professor. It was her early eye-opening stints in teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience that led to her hypothesis about what really drives success: not genius, but a unique combination of passion and long-term perseverance.
In Grit, she takes us into the field to visit cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, teachers working in some of the toughest schools, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she’s learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers—from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll.
Ladies Who Launch is the first company to define the feminine approach to launching a business, and to make the connection between starting a business and bringing creativity into your life with self-esteem and happiness. The nationally acclaimed program has enabled thousands of women across the country to break out of 9-to-5 and thrive in entrepreneurial enterprises that reflect their true passions, skills, and desires. Now available in book form, their 4-step incubator process, using self-tests, inspiring stories, and practical information, gives women the courage to dare to follow a cherished but unfulfilled dream.
In The Path Made Clear, Oprah shares what she sees as a guide for activating your deepest vision of yourself, offering the framework for creating not just a life of success, but one of significance. The book’s ten chapters are organized to help you recognize the important milestones along the road to self-discovery, laying out what you really need in order to achieve personal contentment, and what life’s detours are there to teach us.
She opens each chapter by sharing her own key lessons and the personal stories that helped set the course for her best life. She then brings together wisdom and insights from luminaries in a wide array of fields, inspiring readers to consider what they’re meant to do in the world and how to pursue it with passion and focus.
