Things To Do In SW Florida

By Kim Mercado, NEXT

When you start a small business, there’s one thing you need more than anything else: money. However, getting money to fund a business has been challenging for women, particularly women of color.

While women continue to make strides in raising more venture capital, they still only garnered just 2% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups in the U.S.

To source money for their new businesses, women need to look at multiple funding avenues. As NEXT points out, one opportunity is small business grants for women, which can get overlooked by traditional loans and lines of credit.

What are business grants for women?

Business grants provide money to set up or grow your business, and you don’t have to pay it back. Free money — sounds good, right?

Grant opportunities are different from business loans because you don’t need to repay them — no lenders or dealing with payback schedules.

The downside is that it can be harder to qualify for a business grant than for a small business loan. You have to be prepared to put some work into the grant application. read more

A $2,500 grant to help low-income seniors pay assessments for condominium repairs.

Exemptions from inspections and reserves for buildings under six stories.

Authorizations for condo boards to take out loans to pay reserves.

These are just a few of the ideas that lawmakers have submitted in response to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ call to help elderly condo unit owners on fixed incomes keep their homes as maintenance and insurance costs skyrocket.

None of the bills are guaranteed to make their way through the Florida Legislature over the next two months. So far, only one — a proposal to restrict state grants for storm hardening to buildings three stories and higher — has been heard by a committee.

After DeSantis made his request in September, some legislative leaders said they were opposed to “bailing out” condo owners, arguing that they spent years waiving reserve funding instead of anticipating inevitable repairs.

A year after the collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside that killed 98 people, the Legislature enacted a new law eliminating the option to waive full funding of reserves for budgets approved after Dec. 31, 2024. read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — The return to Earth of Boeing’s Starliner astronauts stuck on the International Space Station inched closer as their replacements arrived to Florida for their relief flight next week.

The quartet assigned to the SpaceX Crew-10 mission arrived to KSC having flown into the former space shuttle landing facility Thursday afternoon. They are slated to climb aboard the Crew Dragon Endurance and launch from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 as early as 7:48 p.m. Wednesday.

NASA astronauts take up two of the four seats with commander Anne McClain and pilot Nichole Ayers. They’re joined by mission specialists Takuya Onishi with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.

Left to Right, NASA astronaut and Crew-10 pilot Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut and Crew-10 mission specialist Takuya Onishi, Roscosmos cosmonaut and Crew-10 mission specialist Kirill Peskov and NASA astronaut and Crew-10 spacecraft commander, Anne McClain hug as they depart the Shuttle Landing Facility in Cape Canaveral on Friday, March 7, 2025. Crew-10 is scheduled to launch on Wednesday, March 12. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel) read more

By Dori Zinn, Bankrate.com

Whether you were forced out of the workforce due to downsizing, a recession or other reasons, you might’ve retired thinking you were done with work for good. But unretirement might change that, whether it’s because you need the money, you miss the social engagement or some other reason entirely.

You don’t have to stop working at some magical age. Even if you don’t want to go back to what you were doing before retirement, you can find meaningful, paying work. Here’s how to know if unretirement is right for you.

What is unretirement?

Unretirement is leaving retirement to return to work, for whatever reason. Some workers might have been forced to retire early due to the COVID-19 pandemic, or a company downsizing might’ve made them believe they can’t work anymore. But that’s not always the case.

Unretirement means you don’t have to stay retired. With the rising cost of what seems like everything, you might be forced back to work even if you were comfortable in retirement. And with 7.6 million open jobs right now, you can explore new ways to work even if you had previously thought you were done working for good. read more

By JESSE BEDAYN

The Trump administration has stalled at least $60 million in funding intended largely for affordable housing developments nationwide, throwing hundreds of projects into a precarious limbo, according to information and documents obtained by The Associated Press