CSW Women’s Summit 2023 | Eagle Conference room 11 am – 12 pm
This discussion will showcase three women entrepreneurs who launched their businesses in New Mexico. The moderator will lead the conversation through the process, pitfalls and lessons learned by the panelists as they got their businesses up and running.
Moderator: Brenda Saiz
Brenda Saiz, Co-Managing Director of the Saiz, Chanez, Sherrell & Kaemper Law Firm
Brenda Saiz focuses on professional malpractice and personal injury litigation. She’s also a mom of three boys and serves as an adjunct professor and lecturer at the University of New Mexico School of Law.
Panelists
Norma Naranjo, The Feasting Place
Norma Naranjo’s mother and grandmother taught her the art of baking bread and pies in their horno (beehive-shaped adobe oven) at the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, and over the years she was frequently asked to prepare her traditional dishes for special events. When she retired, she decided to start The Feasting Place, catering and teaching others how to prepare dishes typically prepared for a Pueblo feast. Norma’s half-day classes welcome small groups into her cozy Pueblo home in Española, where she highlights local ingredients and shares cultural traditions. You’ll learn to make a variety of traditional dishes. Sit-down feasts for up to 40 people are also available.
Kei Tsuzuki, Co-founder of Kei & Molly Textiles
Kei Tsuzuki has been dedicated to community economic development throughout her professional life. Starting in the 1990s, she developed her passion for economic development working for Canada’s first micro-loan fund, Calmeadow, in Toronto, Ontario. Through Calmeadow’s domestic programs and its international involvement with Bolivia’s BancoSol, serving La Paz’s indigenous community, Kei learned the profound impact of valuing the economic contributions of traditionally marginalized peoples.
With these concepts in mind, she worked for over a decade with New Mexico’s ground-breaking social enterprise, Southwest Creations Collaborative, which is dedicated to building economic and educational opportunities across generations.
In 2010, Kei co-founded Kei & Molly Textiles, LLC, a social enterprise which today creates hand-printed, artisan-quality home goods while developing high-quality jobs for immigrants and refugees in Albuquerque. A for-profit business, Kei & Molly Textiles demonstrates how small businesses can support dignified jobs that invest in the development of their workers and still be profitable. Providing a good paying wage, health benefits, leadership development opportunities, and social supports, Kei & Molly Textiles currently employs 12 staff members, many of whom arrived to the United States in the past 6 years with little to no spoken English. The business sells its products in over 400 stores across the country.
Kei is a graduate of Princeton University and received her Masters in Business Administration from the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management.
Tricia McKenna, Psychologist, Certified EFT Therapist and Owner
As a psychologist and co-founder of Life Change Psychotherapy Institute for more than 27 years, Tricia has focused her career on the power of the heart to heal psychological wounds. She brings to her practice a variety of clinical experiences from psychiatric hospital and outpatient clinics to emergency stress management at national disaster sites.
