Watch as our Motivators inspire courage, confidence, and collaboration.

Adrian Wilton at WomenLeadNYC 2016

Adrian Wilton,  Entrepreneur, Urban Farmer  Principal Owner at Living Restoration LLC. Adrian is  project director of Living Restoration — a start-up focused on integrating nature, especially edible plants, into the “built” environment — has spearheaded the planting of a vertical farm, which is cultivating plant life on vertically inclined surfaces on Staten Island.

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Jen Slaw CONNECT. CREATE. CHANGE. #WomenLeadNYC 2016

Jen Slaw shares her 4 key strategies for gaining confidence and making the decision to take action to CREATE the life you want. Discover how to build strength, dismantle limiting beliefs, and write your own story transitions to make positive CHANGE…just as Jen did from structural engineering to professional juggling and non-profit leadership.

Bootstrapping and Building a Company by Aileen Gemma Smith at #WomenLeadNYC

Aileen takes you through “Bootstrapping and Building a Company” at WomenLeadNYC 2016 on Thursday March 24th at the Staten Island Arts Culture Lounge in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.

Aileen Gemma Smith is CEO and Founder of Vizalytics Technology, the New York data company bridging the information access gap between government and citizens, businesses, and communities. Smith has worked as a content manager, strategist and consultant for Newsweek, the Financial Times and Razorfish. She created Staten Island Counts, which mined publicly-available data to reveal insights about the NYC borough where she grew up.

Aileen is honored to be a  member of the WE-NYC Inaugural Class of Mentors to Support Underserved Women Entrepreneurs in New York City. To Aileen, “being a WE Connect Mentor is an opportunity to give back to others. Vizalytics Technology is successful today because of the many individuals who have helped and supported me. Now it is my obligation to other entrepreneurs to open doors and help them succeed as well. I am a business owner not just to sell a product, but also to support my community and help the next group of entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses,”

Created in 2012, #WomenLeadNYC 2016 is part conference, part workshop, part networking with a panel discussion and a virtual and in-person workshop that will create teams that will collaborate on action plans to enable/empower/promote women as leaders.  Curated by Marilyn Zayfert and Nancy Ayala, this popular event enables women to work together and set their goals and move in strategic direction.

“5 Steps to Fabulous: Choices for Living Beautifully, Inside and Out!” #WomenLeadNYC Vanessa Coppes

Vanessa Coppes believes women are multi-faceted. They embrace the outer roles of wife, mother, sister, daughter and friend. And they have inner roles; those that need to be honored in order to be authentic, productive and truly happy.

Vanessa Coppes candidly shares her journey towards grace. 5 Steps to Fabulous is not just a guide for looking and feeling your best everyday ; with a lot of humor, spirituality, radical self-love and authenticity, Vanessa shares an abundance of life lessons for women who want to live purpose-filled lives, while rocking red lipstick. You will cry, laugh and most importantly, accept and embrace the awesomeness of the beautiful being you are.

Like many women, Coppes struggled with weight, periods of insecurity and postpartum depression. It was the wisdom of her mother and the connection with other strong, beautiful women around her that reminded her of how to best honor and nurture herself back to living life.

She went on to study Design, Psychology and Education in college. Writing, however has always been her outlet to both internalize lessons, to teach and to connect with others. Coppes is a seeker, a student of life and she is committed to sharing with and teaching others what she has learned through her experiences. She meets women where they are and helps them create lives and businesses they love.

Co-Curator Marilyn Zayfert has found “Women don’t get to climb up the corporate ladder one rung at a time.  The climb is convoluted like the game Chutes and Ladders. There are ways to shape change and promote women leaders. Events like #WomenLead2016 continually motivate women to work toward their professional goals.”

#WomenLeadNYC 2016 begins with fast-paced interactive presentations. After this, the audience (online and in-person) will divide into small groups to interact and brainstorm for a half hour followed by a debriefing session and networking. The panel will then present each group’s action points. This unique event that combines a live event with a digital online counterpart.  By doing this WomenLeadNYC creates unique collaborative environments that produce actionable takeaways– for women, by women, although men are welcome and actually, our experience shows, can provide valuable contributions.

The Curators of WomenLeadNYC chose Staten Island Arts Culture Lounge venue at the Ferry not only for it’s convenient location to everywhere in NYC, but for the work it does empowering Artists to overcome obstacles. In the Arts 51% of visual artists today are women and only 28% of museum solo exhibitions spotlighted women in eight selected museums throughout the 2000s. (1). Though women earn half of the MFAs granted in the US, only a quarter of solo exhibitions in New York galleries feature women.(2) Research has shown that women, more than men possess leadership styles associated with effective performance as leaders. So why are significantly fewer women in leadership roles than men?(3) Combining the power of the Arts with creative ideas, collaboration and communication Women lead.

1. The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, 2013.
2. Brainstormers Research, 2006 and Saltz, Village Voice, September 21, 2006.
3.  http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2013-w50-research-symposium/Documents/eagly.pdf