Our work at hEr VOLUTION has always focused on making STEM more inclusive for not only the most vulnerable groups, but also giving a voice to the people who can help make this possible as well – you!
In our work, we get to meet with so many young women who are always wondering about their future. There were many questions unanswered by us when we could not pinpoint Canadian role models in STEM or the numerous opportunities STEM has to offer for these young women. To change that, we gathered a crowdsourced campaign back in 2017 where you have nominated Canadian Women in STEM. Our goal was to find 150 women to use as role models and we were fortunate to highlight over 160. Thank you for that! This campaign ignited an idea, for us to go further and bring some of these women to life over a one-day event. We successfully brought together 15 of these women who were diverse in their work and represented the future of our STEM fields. They talked about their journey to where they are today, where and how it all started for them and shared their advice with the young women on getting started and with advice for the STEM fields to become more inclusive and diverse. The conversation was raw and a community was built in the room that day.
The next year, in 2018, we ran another conference all because some of the women in the audience have decided to join in and make it happen. That is how our second conference was born, another sold-out event. We broke barriers with our panels who discussed Science Communications and Networking, Innovation in Technology, Financial Planning and breaking barriers for the LGBTQA+ community in STEM. We all left satisfied because we knew we were making a difference.
This year, we wanted to make a bigger impact and thought that having a one day event would be the way to go, however, after a very long discussion and brainstorming with our team, we decided that in order to make a greater impact we would have to do more and, instead of having a one day conference as we originally intended, we will be having multiple events throughout 2020 because we want to stick to our goal to spread our message to a broader, diverse audience. As such, we decided to put a pause on our conference this year and focus on bringing you our panels over multiple events to help us deliver their important message.
Please stay tuned for future announcements from us. We appreciate your support and look forward to continuing to break barriers with you in order to make the future of work for women in STEM inclusive and open to all.