All Women L.E.A.D is a community for women to learn and grow together.
Built by social worker Jennifer Slay and professor and mentor Melissa Maloney. L.E.A.D is an acronym which encourages people to leverage, empower, achieve, and do.
Slay and Maloney co-host various series as part of the community events. This time, the two women co-founded the Rise Up series – an educational, motivational, and uplifting virtual event for women and allies.
The Leverage event for the series took place virtually on Oct. 17 with around 65 participants.
“Even though we have an overriding theme for the season, we’ll try and find people that fit with each of those, each of those after each of those letters. So that and then we tie sort of an overarching theme on top of that,” Maloney said about the series having various events tied with the community’s name.
The event featured Melissa Davis, president of online lifestyle brand Ugly Duckling, Susan Goebel, founder and CEO of Scaling Management Consulting Group, and Leanne Mayer London Music Awards winner for best contemporary singer-songwriter.
During the event Mayer spoke of her experience re-entering the music industry after a 10-year gap.
“I was single at the time, and I was 33. I had just come out of a toxic relationship, so I didn’t even really have any good friends to kind of go out with to meet new people. So, I leaned out to my network, and I so I could try to meet somebody and try to learn some different techniques to find people to play with. And that brings me to my story of how I actually got back into music based on leveraging my networking.”
The co-founders agreed that the speakers are one of the most important features of these events.
“When we first started Jen and I did a lot of the speaking ourselves because we both do speaking engagements. And then we decided early on that it made sense for us to really focus on other people and not us,” said Maloney.
The series focuses on bringing speakers from diverse backgrounds and experiences for the participants to hear and learn from.
The All Women L.E.A.D community is reducing its membership rates to $2.99 per month in hopes that it will be more accessible, especially to students.
“I would say we would typically offer some access to students or some free tickets usually to students and I don’t want to say that won’t continue. But we’re also hoping with our shift in making the membership just $2.99 a month that that will open up and not make price a factor for more people,” Maloney added.
Slay’s hopes for the event was for women to be able to connect with stories shared by speakers and understand how to leverage their own strengths.
“What we’d really like are for women to just believe in themselves, reconnect with whatever might be missing or network with other people. Collaborate. We just want people to go beyond what they thought was possible. So, we just want people to grow and succeed.”
There are three remaining events for this series, happening in January, March and June 2023. The March event will be an International Women’s Day special held in hybrid mode with entertainment and extra speakers.
“We’ve definitely built a community and then people bring friends and we’ve, we’ve started to gain some audience coming from corporations that are looking to give access to women in their organizations to have access to events or things specific for women,” said Maloney.
For future events and membership details, visit www.allwomenlead.ca.
