Life, Work, World: Women Empowering Change
The second Social Media Week event I went to last week was called Life, Work, World: Women Empowering Change. It was open to both men and women but the speakers were a great line-up of three women who are doing their part to make changes in the world.
In the interests of full disclosure I should say that the host of the evening, Sinead Mac Manus is my closest friend who I’ve known since 1995. She is the founder of 8Fold, a digital wellbeing company, and this is the first in a series of events on the Life, Work, World theme - the three areas which greatly influence our lives.
The Life portion of the evening was conducted by Claire Beegan, Director of Live Events for Wellbeing In The City. Claire clearly has massive enthusiasm for her work and was a passionate and interesting speaker. Wellbeing In The City (currently in Beta form) is designed to be a new social networking site based around what they’ve identified as the 7 areas of wellbeing. Claire herself was well familiar with the pressures of city living, having done her time on the hamster wheel working in property development. Her story of trying to balance her career, which she loved, with relationships, friends, healthy living etc. was familiar to everyone in the room to one extent or another. However Wellbeing In The City doesn’t seem to be setting out to suddenly or dramatically change people’s lives. Some of us like the city dwelling, including its stresses, but it does aim to give people options - minor tweaks to help them address any one of those 7 areas which may be out of balance slightly. The idea is to do this by engaging a community of people, who can offer suggestions and share their stories too. It’s a really interesting idea, and I’ve since signed up to the beta site. I look forward to seeing how it develops.
The second speaker was Francesca Geens, founder of Digital Dragonfly and she spoke on the Work theme. Digital Dragonfly help small businesses to get the most out of technology and systems available to them - and by business she means anyone as small as one person working for themselves from home. As someone who works for a large organisation and doesn’t have much control over the systems used, it wasn’t all that relevant for me but there’s no doubt that Francesca knows her stuff and many of the other attendees I spoke to afterwards and who asked questions during her session seemed to gain a lot from hearing her speak. I loved her easy approach, in picking old schools forms of working (like filing cabinets) and replacing them with easy-to-use, and often free, modern technology (like Dropbox).
The final speaker of the evening was Sinead Mac Manus herself who devoted the World portion of the evening to launching her new initiative - the Sky High Challenge. Sinead recently read the amazing book, Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn and like me and many others couldn’t help but be horrified and then inspired by the book. She told the silent gathering some of the stories from the book, passing on her passion and hope that things can change, in the face of utter misery.
So, to the Sky High Challenge. Having read the book, Sinead identified the things that we women in the UK have that the women and girls in the book don’t - money, a network and crucially, a voice. She decided to spur us to use these things to effect change in the world by setting a series of challenges for those who sign up. Some of the steps will be small (like reading the book, or sharing the Girl Effect video) and others will require more committment, like hosting fundraising events. The challenge is in very baby, pre-beta form at present but will be hosted on Facebook, in the interests of making it easy to sign up and share challenges.
It was a great event and the attendees seemed really energised by all three speakers. It was also a great networking event and I personally met some really interesting women there. I look forward to the future events in the Life, Work, World series.
