Lisa Raiola has dedicated the latter part of her career to helping make the dreams of aspiring small business owners come true.

That work, which goes on every day within the communal kitchens at Warren’s Hope & Main, has now been recognized on a national level, with Raiola being named the USA Today’s “Woman of the Year” for the state of Rhode Island.

The award is bestowed to women representing all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico, D.C., and five national recipients, and includes names such as former Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman and Hollywood A-lister Eva Longoria. Among state recipients are criminal defense attorneys, indigenous James Beard-winning chefs and bestselling authors, and influential female scientists; any women who “are leaders and entrepreneurs, activists and trailblazers in our communities,” the award page describes. “They are women who make a difference every day.”

So, how did it feel to be named among that list?

“That was pretty amazing, and it’s such a great honor,” Raiola said on Monday. “When I saw my picture that big on the front page of the [Providence Sunday Journal] I thought, had I committed some kind of federal crime?”

Raiola’s deflection from admiring her own accolade is very on brand.

While the success of Hope & Main has been undeniable since Raiola purchased a vacant school building at 691 Main St. in Warren a decade ago — the nonprofit has been responsible for the creation of over 500 small food businesses being created in the state (60% owned by women, 40% owned by minorities) — Raiola will be the first to spread credit around to her team, and to the entrepreneurs themselves who actually make the magic happen.

The secret sauce of success
Through a model of lowering the barrier of entry for individuals to enter the arena of starting a small business, and stabilizing the financial risk they take on by providing a professional-grade kitchen space that can be rented out and shared among others, Hope & Main offers an opportunity for anyone with a dream and a small nest egg to take a shot at making those aspirations a reality.

This, Raiola said, is essential to providing people a way to unlock a different level of potential than they might have otherwise thought possible, provide upward financial mobility, and generate widespread economic stimulation; particularly for groups who might find such opportunity hard to find otherwise.

“It’s empowerment…and believing that people already have that power, and we’re just unleashing it,” she said. “It’s the adage of ‘Give a girl a fish, you feed her for a day. Teach her to fish, and you’re feeding her for a lifetime.’”

“But, if we teach her to make a fish pâté business, you’re going to have her be able to benefit her family and her whole community.”

While not every business that springs up from Hope & Main will succeed indefinitely, however nearly half of them remain operational as of today. A growing group of them have found widespread success, landing wholesale deals with national grocery chains and winding up as mainstays in other small business retail shops throughout Rhode Island.

The model is so effective that is has created what Raiola has identified as a “good problem to have” for the state. Some of these food businesses become so successful that they actually have to leave the state in order to find affordable, higher-capacity manufacturing options or real estate to be able to reasonably continue their growth.

“The thing to think about is, let’s say you set up a university but there’s no graduate school,” she said. “The bigger issue for us and Rhode Island is that second stage growth for our businesses…And that bar is becoming higher. We’re incubating these businesses, but we’d like to keep them here as part of our growing food economy.”

Even still, Hope & Main isn’t planning on slowing down their incubation process. They are looking to have a communal kitchen space similar to what they have in Warren turned online in Providence early in 2025, expanding that operation until they are able to incubate between 200 and 250 businesses at any one time between the two communities. And there’s no shortage of interest either.

“Last year we had 300 applications,” Raiola said, with 150 of those coming from the Greater Providence area.

Hope & Main also just finalized a version of their business curriculum in Spanish, which Raiola anticipates will result in an “explosion” of interest from Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs in the near future, particularly from the Providence area.

“I know it’s the first one in Rhode Island and it might even be the first of its kind in the nation,” Raiola said. “We know how many people there are just out there waiting.”

Some advice from a Woman of the Year
Raiola’s journey to becoming the food business incubating queen of the Ocean State had many twists and turns. A Philadelphia native, she spent a significant portion of the early part of her career overseeing medical ethics as an administrator for Harvard Pilgrim Health and Brown University, where she also received her degree in biomedical ethics.

“Ethics is also about a journey, a process. It isn’t good and evil,” she said. “It’s the areas of life where you try to make good decisions and try to do the right thing. I’ve always thought about how can we leave the world better than we found it.”

Then a uterine cancer diagnosis upended her life, and plans changed. That experience taught Raiola that being flexible and learning to deal with the hand that life gives you at any given moment was crucial.

“It’s about setting your sails and learning how to reset them, and reset them again, or maybe set them in a different direction than you first thought you were going to go,” she said. “Being able to be resilient and cope with what was never in your plans is probably the most valuable skill you can learn in your life. We see it here a lot, and it is a metaphor for my own experience. Most of what happens in your life, 99.9% of it, you didn’t plan for it. When you realize that, it’s kind of liberating.”

And it’s fitting that Raiola, who survived her bout with cancer and went on to create a business that embodies the concept of providing hope for others to enrich and empower their own lives, is the one offering that opportunity to whoever walks in the door.

“I love the second chance. I love the idea that you can’t fail if you don’t quit. It’s easier said than done. When you’re out there thinking it’s so easy to quit and it’s so hard to continue on,” she said. “The intangible ingredient in incubation is that you believe in someone, and believe in their idea. And that often makes the difference between someone living to fight another day, and being done with something.”