Gutsy Girls Do Business

An Intergenerational Forum

Girls Real Lives Conference
UNC-Greensboro

A panel and forum to encourage coaching and mentoring between school-aged girls and business-women in their community.

Designed and facilitated by Debra J. Gawrych, CEO
Common Boundaries Consulting & Communications

Designed as an intergenerational forum between women in the business community and school-aged young women (middle-school, high school and college). The purpose was to bring together ordinary women from both groups, ie. not just the highly visible well-known women CEOs to coach and mentor to each other by sharing their own stories. Mentoring also took place by small-group facilitation, in which both parties responded to pre-determined questions devised to engage them into discussion:

Who inspired you?
What would you like to be doing 5 or 10 years from now?
What leadership roles have you taken on?
What personal strengths do you use either at work, with your family, at school or wherever else you interact with others?
What frustrate you most when you are working towards achieving a goal?
When do you coach and mentor? When does someone else coach and mentor you?
Where do we go from here?

25 women attended the forum. A few of the girls were disinterested at first, preferring to pass notes and tap each other on the head with a pencil, but gradually became interested as woman after woman told her business story.

One woman was a graphics designer that found her true calling after becoming an editor of a magazine targeting women. Another was a professional recruiter who came to her profession after 15 years in the printing industry. Yet another was a Spanish Translator, creating her own company out of her own strengths and using that strength to empower herself financially and others, by employing other Spanish speaking people.

After each woman told her story, the participants were divided into groups of 4 or 5, each including girls and business-women. They used the above questions as a starting point for their discussions.

As the discussions continued the room was electrified. The young girls who were passing notes before were totally engaged. They were firing questions at the women in their group. "How did you get into film making?" and "Why do you promote a sport like lacrosse?" One business woman said "Don't let anyone tell you that you can't do something. You are worth more than that!" Her comment was directed at a girl who was baring her soul about how no one in her life gave her praise or support. People continually told her she wouldn't amount to anything.

When the time came to bring the whole group back to discuss what they had learned, the participants wanted to continue. The feedback was that we hadn't given them enough time to discuss.

Feedback for what they learned and where to go from here:

That it was important to get your strength from within and value yourself.
That there are so many more employment opportunities than they had ever imagined.
That it felt good to have someone listen.
To follow your dreams.
To ask other people for help.
That it can be fun mentoring to other people.
That it is important to take time out to just talk with people.
Don't let anyone tell you that you won't amount to anything.
Have courage
Be gutsy! And tell others "You go girl!"

Prologue

Two of the business women signed up to volunteer in a formal school mentoring program the next week. One of the girl's mothers gave her story to a Mom's Empowerment program at the Women's Resource Center. Hopefully, the effects of the program will reverberate throughout the school and business communities.