Staff Report
Raiza Giorgi, publisher of the Santa Ynez Valley Star and the Santa Barbara Family and Life Magazine was recently named a finalist for the Spirit of Entrepreneurship Awards, which will be on May 5 at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara.
“I feel very honored to be a finalist, and love what the foundation is doing for the community by inspiring our youth and people in the community that have the entrepreneur bug. I already feel like a winner, and couldn’t do this without my amazing team behind me,” Giorgi said.
Giorgi started the Santa Ynez Valley Star as a monthly publication in February of 2016 with 16 pages and a dozen advertisers and grew it within a matter of months to a bi-monthly publication and took on the Santa Barbara Family and Life Magazine in January of 2017.
The The Spirit of Entrepreneurship Awards event is hosted by the Spirit of Entrepreneurship™ Foundation. The event is unique in that student entrepreneurs are inspired by successful role models in addition to winning cash prizes as seed money for their businesses as well as scholarships. At the same time, outstanding women entrepreneurs are honored with beautiful engraved awards from Tiffany. The proceeds from the event go toward funding the student awards the following year.
The students, who receive cash prizes (in the form of seed money) and scholarships, are the winners of SBCC Scheinfeld Center’s New Venture Challenge one-day business pitch awards. The top three student winners at each level are selected by judges a week before the SOE Awards and attend the Awards dinner and ceremony as the Foundation’s guests.
For more information or to purchase tickets to the event, log onto www.soefoundation.org.
