There were two reasons I volunteered to help with the MassWIT Women’s Leadership Conference (WLC) in honor of International Women’s Day. First, the co-chairs, Laura Gushue and Cynthia Shanahan, made it sound interesting and rewarding. Second, I was networking and looking for work, and wanted to do something useful with other women. By the time the volunteer work really started in earnest I was already hooked by the vision of what we were going to accomplish, even though by then I had a new job and plenty to do between work and family.

Although much of our work was via email or phone conferences, some of it involved the entire volunteer group. I was totally awed at the first large group meeting, when the committee chairs were reporting on their plans and progress. The plans were so big! The goals so high! From planning gift bags for all attendees to arranging gifts for speakers, to finding the best speakers, to creating a benefit package for the volunteers, I had never worked on a project or team with so many bright ideas and inspired leaders. And all of us were empowered to get the work done. My vision for how good things could be raised quite a few notches.

So as the weeks passed and we made progress toward the conference, mostly things went well, and sometimes there were challenges. However, no one had time or interest to complain, instead we turned to one another for solutions and continued to make solid,and sometimes great, progress.

My area of responsibility was in the marketing team and focused on “Attendee Acquisition” - writing invitations and reminders, for example, and distributing them as far and wide as possible, and inviting others to do so as well. I joined email lists, searched Google for women’s groups and their contact names, and sent out quite a lot of mail – that was easy. The harder part was inviting women at work that I was just getting to know. But I spread the word and put up flyers, and the women that attended because of it have all thanked me a number of times for introducing them to the conference. 

Finally, the conference came and it was just a very amazing day. All the volunteers were truly positive, focused and upbeat and that just makes the entire day fun. I really wasn’t tired or even glad it was over at the end, even though I started at 6:30am and helped throughout the day and on the clean up after 8pm. It’s great to be part of something this good that provides so much value for so many people: the attendees, speakers, and even exhibitors all were enriched by all of us creating this conference together.

Here are some comments from two conference attendees:

"I enjoyed working with the many volunteers that worked on the WLC as a whole. Working closely with the talented members of the marketing team was a wonderful experience. Meeting the speakers and attendees day of and hearing their feedback was extremely rewarding.  Attendees came up to me during lunch and thanked me for of my hard work. Moments like that make it all worthwhile."
-Leah Graves