Tara Attfield-Tomes
Founder, EAST VILLAGE. & The 51% Club
Tara Attfield-Tomes is a PR and visibility strategist, founder, and Power Broker for female enterprise. She founded EAST VILLAGE., the UK's only Visibility Agency for female founders and leaders, and The 51% Club, a 2,000+ strong national network fuelling female entrepreneurship from pre-revenue to policy change.
EAST VILLAGE. is a multi-award-winning agency combining PR, personal brand strategy, speaking, podcasting, and events — all under one roof. Where most agencies treat press coverage as the end goal, EAST VILLAGE. treats visibility as a growth strategy, built around one question: how does being seen translate into commercial outcomes?
The 51% Club is the UK's home for ambitious female founders and leaders — a national community with a core mission of getting more women-led businesses to £1 million and beyond. With 2,000+ members across five city hubs, it delivers expert-led events, paid membership, and a growing programme of initiatives including the Million Pound Ladder, Fortuna Fellowship, Female Enterprise Forum, and annual flagship conference IGNITE.
Tara co-chairs The Whole Point, a Treasury-backed initiative to increase capital flow to high-growth women-led businesses outside London, and sits on the Innovate UK Women in Innovation Community Forum. She has given evidence to Parliament in support of the Women and Equalities Committee's Female Entrepreneurship report.
Her work sits at the intersection of visibility, wealth creation, and systemic change for women in business.
Why do you support the work of The Entrepreneurs Network?
For too long, supporting women in business has been treated as everyone's responsibility, which means that it’s no one's priority. I support The Entrepreneurs Network because I believe meaningful change has to come from the top down.
Policy that puts female founders at the centre doesn't just set the agenda; it sets the benchmark for quality of delivery across every region. Without that, we'll keep seeing patchy, underfunded, inconsistent support that fails women at the very moments they need it most.
Through The 51% Club, I see every day what's possible when women get the right room, the right resources, and the right backing. The Entrepreneurs Network's policy work is the top-down counterpart to that, and together, it's how we actually move the dial.
Why is the UK an attractive place to grow a business?
The UK has incredible entrepreneurial talent, world-class research institutions, and a culture that genuinely celebrates founders. And with schemes like EIS and SEIS offering some of the most generous tax incentives for early-stage investment in the world, the conditions for backing ambitious businesses are genuinely strong.
But attractiveness alone isn't enough; the question is whether the infrastructure matches the ambition. For female founders especially, the gap between potential and reality is still significant. The UK has everything it needs to be the best place in the world to start and scale a women-led business. We're just not there yet, and that's exactly why the policy work matters.