GROW recently hosted its first Regional Conference in SoCal, serving our female team members from San Diego all the way up to Fillmore. This day-long event featured networking, programming, and professional development and was a great success. We asked a few of our women who attended for their impressions.
Nancy Rivas, Branch Administrator | BVLS San Diego
"What I enjoyed the most was being able to interact with BV women from all the different business lines. Hearing stories of how they came to BV was very interesting. One in particular was from a young woman from the Design Group. She was recruited through an ASLA conference she attended, and although she did not live in California, BV assisted her in relocating from Massachusetts. She left her family behind but she expressed how much she loved her job and how she feels a part of a family at work. That is how a job should feel!
I also participated on the Work-Life Harmony panel. Being able to share what I do to find balance between my work life and home life was great! We all have plenty of things in common but I learned most of us also do something unique that keeps our work/life balance in harmony. We just have to find what works us."
Annita DeGiglio, Design Studio Production Manager | BVDG Orange County
"Our studio is pretty lucky in that we have the space to host various meetings and events for BrightView. I personally enjoy being able to put faces with names and email addresses that I’ve communicated with for the last four years, so I was very excited to participate in the day’s festivities.
Vice President and General Manager of BVLD Orange County, Po Chen, introduced the crowd to a Mentoring program he and some volunteers are spearheading and divided us into small groups to roleplay as Mentor/Mentee/Observer – I think each Mentee in my small group walked away with guidance for our non-scripted issues discussed with our Mentors.
Kate Douglas Kestyn, Senior Associate, Design Group, facilitated a panel on work-life harmony, with four volunteers to share some of the adversities they face which seem to be more female-specific (most notably having a family to take care of once they leave the office and the issue of working outside of office hours) and how they cope with or work around them – for those of us not in project management, we were introduced to the concept of having a “Critical Path.” There is some comfort in knowing that your struggles are not unique, others have walked or tread before you.
When our participation with “Dress for Success” was brought up, the crowd seemed to take pride in the idea that BrightView could not just partner with local branches to donate clothes, but also expand it into a source of recruitment and beef up the number of women in our industry!
As someone with a bad habit of mumbling and not speaking loudly enough, what personally resonated most during outside speaker Meiko Takayama’s session, was how some women (particularly millennials) tend to speak. For example, “Up Speak” is making the end a sentence sound more like a question instead of a statement – this makes you seem like you’re looking for consensus; in turn, that yearning betrays a lack of confidence.
Based on the conference, I’m now motivated to keep the ball rolling and dive back into reading “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg and “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss. I also have the TED Talk by Amy Cuddy “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are” queued for watching, and will keep an eye out for when Meiko (@weareinawe) hopefully takes the stage someday to give her own musingly titled “The Currency of Business” TED Talk. And I’m excited to see how this conference GROWs for the other areas of the nation that have yet to experience it!"
Jennifer Bang, Regional Office Manager | BVDG Orange County
"I grew more excited about hosting the first GROW Regional Conference at our studio while setting up for the event. Day of, it was great to see so many BV women in one place from different regions and different lines of service. This was a wonderful sight. Our studio was filled with amazing energy from all participants, ready to take the next step in self-improvement both professionally and personally. The Conference was a great opportunity for the group to network with women from other BV service lines and see old colleagues. I hope this amazing energy grows with the GROW Regional Conferences."
GROW will be hosting two more of these Regional Conferences in 2019 – one in Blue Bell later this spring and one in Florida in the fall. We hope you can join us to gain similar insight and experience as these ladies and the other attendees did. And if you’re not in one of these Regions, know that we are looking to host at least three in 2020 and will be hopefully coming your way.
The following two positions are currently in need of volunteers:
