Amazing Women

Perhaps the most tangible part of social networking for me is the wide range of friends and ideas I'm able to reconnect with or discover at my fingertips. I wanted to share a few of amazing things some of these women are doing.

Bee-utiful

Maybe it was the "Save the Honeybees" campaign on the side of a häagen-daz container or some random news bit, but when I saw that my friend Tiffany had started keeping her own honey bees, I thought how cool. I've enjoyed reading about her updates and it's gotten me to pay attention to the apiary movement popping up at work and following Vanishing Bees. 

Run, Recycle, and Yum

Her enthusiasm has been contagious as long as I've known her, so I love that my friend Kelly's blog tackles everything from how to make a fabulous quilt to homemade granola; how to train for your first half marathon to composting. Her energy makes my day brighter every time I have a chance to hear what she's working on.

Brilliant and Raising Three Boys
What I love about catching up with my friend Sarah's life through her blog is I get the perfect balance of real life peppered with her brilliant rhetoric commentary (because she's a rock star PhD). It also reminds me that life is way more fun with laughter, chaos and the ones you love.

Doing Exactly What She Wants
Anytime I think about what exactly I want to do personally or professional, I think about my friend Jen who's living the dream on the West Coast. Exactly what she said she was going to do. She's looking at our 30s with a serious "take the world by storm, but let's do while having a glass of wine" mentality. Oh, and she's wicked smart about the interwebs. California Dreaming.

Ciao Bella
We never got to spend enough time together in KC, but I love hearing about Caroline's adventures in Northern Italy. Living abroad in Italy. Enough said.

There are so many other women who inspire me and I promise to post links to their online musing soon.

Getting It Down On Paper

The following is a jumble of thoughts that are not fully formed into a singular idea, but it is important to me to capture them in a state of flux and to share them to aid in the formation of a greater idea.
 
Gathered around a computer on Monday night with the women of my book club I realized there needs to be a shift. Sitting in a pew at Sixth & I Synagogue last night I realized that I could help source, not just support a new idea. Perhaps the catalysts seem disparate, but these two statements are now steeping in my brain:

-Only women can manage to be 50 percent of the world's population and still be a special interest group.

-Giving can be an intrinsic part of a for-profit business model.

The first was remarked by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana a book about an extraordinary woman who created a business in Afghanistan that employed dozens of women during the Taliban rule of the past decades. In discussing her work with her directly surrounded by a group of women I have known for more than a decade I was struck that we could be doing more here and abroad.

Why is it that women have allowed societal pressures to fit in, succeed and advance compromise how we treat each other. Why are we unable to support each other at work, at home, at large without first judging, competitively measuring and compromising our own ethos. For all the examples of women empowerment and support of women's initiatives we may read or even experience, we still limit our own capacity for fundamentally altering society by perpetuating the negative and limiting constructs of the past. We judge ourselves, each other and then blame society.

The second idea came from Blake Mycoskie speaking about his new book Start Something That Matters. The idea that he frames his work with TOMS not as a shoe company, but rather around the one for one idea came into focus for me as he was speaking. For-profit companies can perpetuate societal change, be the subject of cause marketing, and still meet their stakeholder obligations.

From where I sit on a daily basis, I see people view the world in starkly different ways. Those that believe you can connect purpose and profit and those that believe connecting those ideas compromises the profit.

I believe we have an obligation to change business constructs and I believe women can help drive this change from within.