Dr. Ashlie L Burkart, MD  is the chief scientific officer at Germin8 Ventures, a venture capital firm that impact invests in the food and agricultural domain, and an associate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Dr. Burkart is a medical doctor boarded in anatomic and clinical pathology with expertise in gastrointestinal pathology, a grant-funded researcher, and a working mother. [Disclosure: AFN’s parent company, AgFunder, is an investor in Nobell Foods.]When Nobell Food’s CEO Magi Richani closed her $100 million Series B round in 2021, she was beating the odds for women entrepreneurs, as only 2.4% of VC funding was going to female-led startups.  . Fast forward to 2022, and PitchBook data shows that funding for these startups has dropped to a mere 2.1%

All Raise’s interim CEO Paige Hendrix Buckner has now dropped the “interim,” according to the nonprofit’s blog post.Hendrix Buckner joined the organization, which supports women founders and funders, as chief of staff in early 2022 and stepped in as interim CEO in January following the resignation of former CEO Mandela S.H. Dixon. Prior to joining All Raise, Hendrix Buckner worked with Dixon at Founder Gym, an online training center for underrepresented founders.As of January, the nonprofit had raised $11 million in funding and was operating regional chapters in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC, and was working on one in Miami.Since taking the helm, Hendrix Buckner got the Miami chapter going in late January, “relaunched its VC Cohorts program for partner and principal level investors, expanded the VC Champions mentorship program and launched our first national Black and Latinx Media Mastery program,” All Raise said in the blog post.In Hendrix Buckner’s own blog post, she wrote that All Raise has 24,000 people in its network and that she’s “passionate about building community,” which Heidi Patel, a VC Cohorts volunteer, also noted in All Raise’s blog post, “We needed someone who can break down barriers, build bridges across deep divides, and infuse pure joy into the challenging work we do together. I have been in the trenches with Paige — she brings all that and more.”As colleague Natasha Mascarenhas noted in her January story, the nonprofit has goals that include increasing the amount of seed funding that goes to female founders from 11% to 23% by 2030, and doubling the percentage of female decision-makers at U.S. firms by 2028.Hendrix Buckner told TechCrunch that All Raise “is not just an organization, it’s a movement,” and that those “were aspirational goals for everyone in the ecosystem.” In order for the nonprofit to move forward successfully and to grow, All Raise will be operating in three buckets:Infrastructure: Building strong internal and external foundations.Community and programming: Hendrix Buckner is going on a seven-city tour to visit with community members in all of its chapters and San Francisco, “to be clear about what our strategy is going to look like over the coming years.” There are also active programs currently for VC partners and principals as well as a VC summit coming up in October.Storytelling: All Raise is bringing back its newsletter and certain events, both in-person and virtual. “We just launched our ‘Power Conversations’ with several incredible heavy hitters,” Hendrix Buckner said

Under her interim leadership the past five months, Allraise launched the Miami Chapter of All Raise, relaunched its VC Cohorts program for partner and principal level investors, expanded the VC Champions mentorship program, and launched its first national Black and Latinx Media Mastery program.