Bio

• Small businesses, women entrepreneurs, communications, marketing• Delegate, White House Conferences on Small Businesses• Founder, owner of fourth-largest voice messaging company in U.S.

Barbara Kasoff is the President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Women Impacting Public Policy, Inc., a non-profit, public policy advocacy organization with over half a million members advocating on economic issues for women in business.

An accomplished entrepreneur, Kasoff has owned and managed several companies; including Voice-Tel of Michigan, the fourth largest voice messaging company in the United States, Voice-Tel of Central Michigan, and Voice Response Corporation, a telemarketing and database marketing company. She also opened and developed Voice-Tel of Australia, a company with 11 offices throughout Australia and New Zealand for the Voice-Tel franchisor.

Prior to becoming a business owner, Kasoff served as Vice President of Customer Service and Senior Vice President of Research and Software Development for World Computer Corporation in Michigan. While there, her team designed and installed new financial services software for credit unions. Altogether, she has been a business owner and corporate executive for 20 years, and has successfully sold three of her four companies.

For many years, Kasoff has been an active supporter for small businesses, particularly those owned by women and minorities. She has linked together thousands of entrepreneurs with her voice messaging network, enabling them to communicate directly with one another to improve their businesses, learn of programs, opportunities and appointments in the communities, improve the climate of entrepreneurship, and play a part in public policy making. Her efforts to unite various organizations have enabled small business owners to share information with each other, learn from one another, and become better informed in economic and political issues.

Kasoff is an appointee to the National Women\'s Business Council, currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Women Business Owners Council, and is Co-Chair of the National Global Trade and Technology Board of Directors, whose mission is to help reverse the long standing trends in balance of trade deficits by making the task of finding, selling and delivering US products and services into global markets as simple as doing business next door. She is a member of the National Board of Directors of the Women’s Leadership Forum for the Democratic National Committee.

In addition, Kasoff has previously served as President of The National Association of Business Owners in Detroit, Vice President of Public Policy for the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), and on various community boards, including: Detroit Edison Community Relations Board, Forgotten Harvest, International Institute and Majority Business Initiative.

She has helped develop new and closer relationships among the US Small Business Administration, Small Business Development Centers, Department of Commerce and local, national and international corporate leaders. Kasoff served as a Delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business, was an invited delegate to President Clinton’s Midwest Regional Economic Summit and was the recipient of the State of Michigan Women in Business Advocate of the Year in 1995.

She and her family reside in San Francisco, CA.

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