A few weeks back, Brina and I were invited to participate in the beyond p!ink, personal and professional development conference held over two days at the Sheraton Wall Centre. One of the organizers found us through the City TV Diversity online database, which was created as "an online tool for helping the media better reflect the changing face of Canada", as my contact information has been listed there for the past few years.
Our actual invitation was to present ourselves, our story and our company at the Friday evening event called the Connect! Young Women in Business Tradeshow, where they would be "featuring 50 of Vancouver's most outstanding female entrepreneurs sharing their stories of success and challenge". We were included as part of the outstanding female entrepreneurs! How COOL is that?
With an initial feeling of excited apprehension, we said YES, filled out our paperwork, bios and submitted it to the organizers.
Although both of us had no idea what to expect, with words like "women" and "tradeshow" and "conference" floating around in our heads, we decided that we would bring our wide array of business cards, our portfolio, one of our display boxes for our stationery and two very open minds :)
The night proved to be a pleasant surprise of really good times! We entered the Wall Centre's assigned hall for the show and saw the lovely layout that the awesome ladies of the YWIB organization prepared for us. With showtime excitement, we introduced ourselves to the organizers who lead us to our home for the next few hours.
We met our neighbour for the night, a fellow awesome woman named Heather, who calls herself a firestarter...which is a term that gets people talking to her and let's her explain that she's a life coach. (I would use a better term as she doesn't like the label "life coach" but I can't think of a better way to explain what she does. Sorry, Heather!)
The organizers scheduled it so that we would have a half hour or so, before the delgates (the women attending their conference) arrived, to meet the other women presenting and check out each other's stuff. We quickly found ourselves stopping to talk to some really interesting and amazing women as we moved from table to table and because the conversation was so great-both ways-we would end up spending way more time at one table and not getting a chance to see everything.
As the show kicked into full swing, we realized how awesome this event was for promoting women like us as well as showing other women out there that a network of women in Vancouver exist who are doing it and making a mark in the business community.
A large portion of the delegates were in their final year of university, with a few knowing what they wanted to be when they grew up and a lot still trying to figure it out. It was great to be able to tell our story to a captive audience and reassure them that it wasn't just all blue skies & daisies :) The best part was meeting some of these amazing women who actually set out to find us at the show, once they knew we were participating.
With an event of this magnitude being so successful, especially the first of it's kind in the West Coast, our hope is that the ladies of YWIB continue to promote, encourage and organize events like this for the next generation of women thinking about their future and what kind of impact they will have on the world.
Let's face it, wouldn't this world be so much better with more gals like us? :)
Thank you again to Ealeen and the rest of the ladies from the Young Women In Business Organization. It was both a pleasure and an honour to participate in your conference.
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