Powerful Women of the Gulf Coast

Who's coming to our Powerful Women Monthly Rethink Meeting this Tuesday from 8:30-9:30am? Grab your seat NOW!
I woke up this morning to SEVEN registration emails for our Rethink meeting this Tuesday!!!! Whoop Whoop!!!

Now, full disclosure, it was one person who went in and registered for several meetings this year, but still I'm excited about our upcoming meetings!

If you aren't registered YET for our Rethink meeting this Tuesday, here's some enticement:

- Special for January's meeting: Check presentation to Family Promise of Escambia County! This was our recent Member Give Back winner nominated and chosen by our members. Lauren Clark, their Executive Director will be joining us that day to accept the check from Powerful Women! If you don't know who they are, this is a great chance to learn a little bit about the amazing work they are doing for our homeless community. We'd LOVE lots of members there to help celebrate this intentional act of charitable giving from one non-profit to another!

- Education Segment for January's meeting: I'm very excited to be bringing one of Suzanne Castle's (Suzanne Castle Consulting) tools to this meeting! It's a workshop-style interactive tool to help you with a Word of the Year. If you haven't picked a word yet, this will be a fun and intentional exercise and if you have already picked a word, this will be a great reinforcement. If you don't typically do this annually or this isn't your thing, that's ok, we'll still have interactive time.

- Held monthly - Rethink meetings for 2023 are held on the 4th Tuesday of every month from 8:30-9:30 am at Gulf Coast Kid's House in Pensacola. Next event, Tuesday, January 24th! (hint- mark your calendar or make my day and register for all of them for the year)

- Bonus time for networkers: 8:00 doors open and optional networking, 8:30-9:30 meeting time, 9:30-10:00 optional networking.

- Rethink main goal is for our attendees to build deep, meaningful relationships that are both personal and professional. Community is so important and it takes time to cultivate creative true business relationships.

- Rethink also includes celebration, honest sharing as well as attendees are encouraged to share a business goal to be accountable for by the next meeting.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/powerful-women-monthly-rethink-meeting-tickets-492133302957

P.S. Those that attend know that you can just show up if you want and we'll let you in. However, if you register on Eventbrite, YOU get an extra special BONUS small gift of appreciation for making our lives easier through the registration process!!

We hope to see you next week!

WINNER WINNER WINNER WINNER!! We have the results of our 2022 Member Give Back!!

Powerful Women of the Gulf Coast believes in creating a spirit of charitable giving. As a matter of fact, it's in our vision statement for the organization!

To encourage charitable giving, we continued our Member Give Back program in 2022! This program was created in 2019 as a way to support our members and the other organizations they love as a way of making all our dollars go further to help our community. For our 2022 Give Back, our board approved a $1 per member donation to the winning organization. With a little over 100 members in Powerful Women currently, it's not a large donation, however, being a not-for-profit ourselves, we know even the little donations are appreciated and all help our common community mission! Plus, it's wonderful to see how many local non-profits our members love and support.

In November we opened up the nominations and we received TWENTY-TWO nominations from our members of amazing non-profits in our local area doing amazing work! In December, we opened up the voting and each member was eligible to cast ONE vote for ONE non-profit. The organization with the most member votes is awarded our 2022 Member Give Back winner and will receive a small monetary donation from Powerful Women.

Our hearts are full of such joy to see our members nominate so many amazing organizations! To congratulate these nominees again, here's the full list of nominated organizations:

Animal Allies Florida
Center for Independent Living of Northwest Florida Center for Independent Living of Northwest Florida, Inc.
Epilepsy Florida, Inc. Epilepsy Alliance Florida
Family Promise of Escambia County Family Promise of Escambia County
Feeding the Gulf Coast, Inc. Feeding the Gulf Coast
Friends of the West Florida Library, Inc Friends of West Florida Public Library WFPL
Gulf Coast Kids House, Inc Gulf Coast Kid's House
Independence for the Blind of West Florida, Inc Independence for the Blind
Keep Pensacola Beautiful, Inc. (aka Our Corner) Our Corner
Kiwanis Club of Big Lagoon Foundation, Inc. Kiwanis Club of Big Lagoon Pensacola
Magdalene's, Inc. Magdalene's Inc.
Movement for Change, Inc Movement for Change
Pensacola Habitat for Humanity, Inc. Pensacola Habitat for Humanity
ReadyKids! (aka Every Child A Reader in Escambia, Inc) ReadyKids FL
Set Free Refuge, Inc. Set Free Refuge, Inc
Sisters of Hope Corporation Sisters of Hope
STEM Story Corporation STEM Story
The Arc Gateway, Inc The Arc Gateway
The Mylo Foundation, Inc The Mylo Foundation
Transitioning Thru Trauma to Triumph, Inc. Transitioning Thru Trauma To Triumph
Unity Church of Christianity of Pensacola, Florida Unity of Pensacola - Spiritual Community
Whistleblowers of America/Workplace Promise Institute, Inc. Whistleblowers of America

The organization with the MOST votes from our members is . . . . .

FAMILY PROMISE OF ESCAMBIA COUNTY!! Family Promise of Escambia County

If you aren't familiar with this organization, their mission is to help families experiencing homelessness and low-income families achieve sustainable independence through a community-based response.

Please join us at our January Rethink meeting on 1/24 for a check presentation and meet their Executive Director!

And the voting this year was close with runner up congrats to the following organizations who TIED FOR SECOND this year in number of votes:

Gulf Coast Kids House, Inc
STEM Story Corporation
The Mylo Foundation, Inc
Transitioning Thru Trauma to Triumph, Inc.

Thank you to each of our members who made nominations and voted in our 2022 Member Give Back!

Businesses! Do you want to get your name and logo in front of our members and supporters? How about promoting your business WHILE donating to an organization focused on supporting women in business? Time for our ?

We have 5 ways to participate in this drive and option #5 is to be a sponsor of our Mailchimp emails! For a $50 per month donation, we will list your company name and logo on the footer of our Mailchimp emails. Each email goes out to 1,000 email addresses and we have an open rate of over 30%. We typically send 1-4 emails per month. You can sponsor one month or multiple months.

What type of women are attracted to our message? Here's a few testimonials from our last few meetings:
- "I found PWGC a few years ago. This group has been my way to connect with positive women who do things unlike what I was doing then - education. I love it and plan to keep coming!" - Kim Stefansson
- "I found PWGC on Eventbrite. I've joined the group and connected with several ladies. I've been attending for around 4 months and I love it. The ladies in the group are so powerful, positive and empowering. These women have motivated me to keep pushing and excelling in life both personal and professional. I love PWGC!"
- "I'm so happy I'm here with you! I've been a member of ABWA Emerald Coast for years in Ft Walton. It's great to be with another group of women interested in business and support systems for women in business." - Sara Rodriguez

To get your company name and logo in front of our members and supporters, complete this form and you'll be contacted with further instructions: https://forms.gle/Qy4bpt6tcoWA11Lu5

Thank you!

Calling successful women in business! Have you seen our ?

We are looking for a few individuals or businesses to help sponsor one of our members for our upcoming Spark class with a full or partial scholarship. Spark Your Power is our small group coaching program for strong women leaders that tackles major mindset issues so they can achieve their goals and be more successful in business. Women face many challenges in starting and running businesses and we have several participants in our upcoming Spark class that aren't fully able to cover the program fees themselves.

Could you help us help these women by being a Spark full sponsor or a Spark partial sponsor? A $450 contribution will cover the full program fees for one participant. Or, a $225 contribution will cover half the program fees for one participant. We will also ask any recipients of these scholarships to agree to a few extra accountability requirements in order to receive the sponsorship.

What does Spark Your Power do for our participants? Here's a few testimonials from our last graduating class:
- "For me, the change has been unbelievable. It started with one word - "delegate". I knew the key to growing this organization is taking things off my plate, however, I've struggled with making that happen. I've attended trainings on delegation, read countless articles and blog posts and still struggled with delegating. Suzanne helped me change that word to "leverage" and my whole perspective changed! After that, we were able to secure a virtual assistant for our big conference in April which is something I would have considered impossible at our current revenue level. It's a work in progress, but I'm well on my way to realigning my time with the work that requires it because of what I learned and continue to learn through Spark." - Kolleen Chesley, Founding Director, Powerful Women of the Gulf Coast
- "I dug deep during the month on boundaries and took away a lot of tools. After hard work incorporating them, I was stunned! I called up our coach and said - Oh my God, thank you for these tools. These tools have gotten me through the second half of the tax season. And I wasn't burned out at the end. I didn't want to scream at my staff at the end. I wasn't the 'hangry angry' me that I normally am. I work with my kids so it's easy to snap at them and I didn't take any stress out on them. Tax deadlines are stressful, but I have two major deadlines a year and the differences from this one and the one in April before starting the coaching program are remarkable." - Christina Powers, Christina Powers Tax

To apply to be a Spark full or partial sponsor, complete this form and you'll be contacted with further instructions: https://forms.gle/Qy4bpt6tcoWA11Lu5
Thank you!

Can you spare a gift for Powerful Women this year?

Lots of women struggle with asking for help. It's in our nature to be caretakers, making sure others' needs are met and sometimes that means we overlook our own or we push harder trying to be super-women.

For Powerful Women, it's no different. We've done a really bad job in the past of asking for help. Actually, we haven't really asked. We invite you to our meetings and events. We encourage ticket sales to our conferences and we promote our Spark Your Power program. We remind you about membership and promote our community events. But we rarely remind you that we have expenses too. We neglect to tell you that our low membership fees only cover about 30% of our expenses. We don't talk about the fact that to run our operations, we rely on multiple software programs (Tradewing, Zoom, Loom, Calendly, Quickbooks, Mailchimp, HP Instant Ink, Dropbox, Google Suite, and Office 365) and none of these programs are free. We don't mention that our Directors & Officers and our General Liability insurance policies are over $1500 annually and our storage unit rental is over $1000. And we've had a hard time keeping up with our compensation obligation to our Executive Director which puts more pressure on the organization. It's time we ask YOU for help.

Enter our Powerful Women Holiday Drive! From now until 12/31, we have 5 ways to participate in this drive and option #3 is to cover some of our General Expenses. Attached is a real sheet of some of our normal expenses. A contribution for any amount is appreciated. This will help us.

Why help? Here's a few testimonials from our last few meetings of the difference we make for women in business:
- "I found PWGC a few years ago. This group has been my way to connect with positive women who do things unlike what I was doing then - education. I love it and plan to keep coming!" - Kim Stefansson
- "I found PWGC on Eventbrite. I've joined the group and connected with several ladies. I've been attending for around 4 months and I love it. The ladies in the group are so powerful, positive and empowering. These women have motivated me to keep pushing and excelling in life both personal and professional. I love PWGC!"
- "I'm so happy I'm here with you! I've been a member of ABWA Emerald Coast for years in Ft Walton. It's great to be with another group of women interested in business and support systems for women in business." - Sara Rodriguez

To participate in our Holiday Drive, complete this form and you'll be contacted with further instructions: https://forms.gle/Qy4bpt6tcoWA11Lu5
Thank you!

Did you see our Women Holiday? We have 5 ways to participate in this drive and option #2 is Pay Two Forward Traditional memberships until 12/31! Make one $50 donation, then YOU give away TWO Traditional memberships to people you choose, OR tell us you want to donate them and we'll add them to our scholarship pool to be given away to women in need.

This is perfect if you want to help further our mission but you aren't interested in joining or you are already one of our member. Give the gift of year-long education, community and support for two aspiring business women. If you are stumped on what to do with the TWO free memberships, here's some great ways to pay-them-forward:
- Use them as corporate gifts for a few extra special clients that supported you this year,
- A cool extra year-end perk for your amazing women employees to add another token of appreciation,
- Use up that last professional development money now and then tell us in January who you want to give the memberships to,
- Reward those local women-owned businesses you already do business with to give them an extra boost of support,
- Don't know a woman-owned business? Chances are there are a ton in your contacts already. Post that you are doing this and see who of your contacts might want a membership.

Why join? Here's a few testimonials from our last few meetings:
- "I found PWGC a few years ago. This group has been my way to connect with positive women who do things unlike what I was doing then - education. I love it and plan to keep coming!" - Kim Stefansson
- "I found PWGC on Eventbrite. I've joined the group and connected with several ladies. I've been attending for around 4 months and I love it. The ladies in the group are so powerful, positive and empowering. These women have motivated me to keep pushing and excelling in life both personal and professional. I love PWGC!"
- "I'm so happy I'm here with you! I've been a member of ABWA Emerald Coast for years in Ft Walton. It's great to be with another group of women interested in business and support systems for women in business." - Sara Rodriguez

To get your Pay Two Forward Traditional memberships, complete this form and you'll be contacted with further instructions: https://forms.gle/Qy4bpt6tcoWA11Lu5
Thank you!

JUST ANNOUNCED - our Powerful Women Holiday Drive! We have 5 ways to participate in this drive and option #1 is Buy One Share One Traditional memberships until midnight December 31st! Make a $50 donation to cover YOUR Traditional Membership in PWGC, plus get a FREE Traditional membership to give to a friend.

If you've been thinking of joining and haven't yet, here's a great chance to join and bring in your bestie too!

Why join? Here's a few testimonials from our last few meetings:
- "I found PWGC a few years ago. This group has been my way to connect with positive women who do things unlike what I was doing then - education. I love it and plan to keep coming!" - Kim Stefansson
- "I found PWGC on Eventbrite. I've joined the group and connected with several ladies. I've been attending for around 4 months and I love it. The ladies in the group are so powerful, positive and empowering. These women have motivated me to keep pushing and excelling in life both personal and professional. I love PWGC!"
- "I'm so happy I'm here with you! I've been a member of ABWA Emerald Coast for years in Ft Walton. It's great to be with another group of women interested in business and support systems for women in business." - Sara Rodriguez

To get your Buy One Share One Traditional memberships, complete this form and you'll be contacted with further instructions: https://forms.gle/Qy4bpt6tcoWA11Lu5

Thank you!

Missed our Powerful Women Monthly Rethink Meeting? We missed you!

We believe in creating a spirit of charitable giving. As a matter of fact, it's in our vision statement for the organization! For the 2022 Member Give Back, our board has approved a donation of $1 per member. With a little over 100 members in Powerful Women currently, it's not a large donation, however, being a not-for-profit ourselves, we know even the little donations are appreciated and all help our common community mission!

For 2022, our members have nominated a total of TWENTY-TWO local non-profits! Our members now have a chance to vote for ONE from this list to receive a small financial donation from our organization.

A huge congrats to the following nominations:
Animal Allies of Florida, Inc Animal Allies Florida
Center for Independent Living of Northwest Florida, Inc. Center for Independent Living of Northwest Florida
Epilepsy Florida, Inc. Epilepsy Alliance Florida
Family Promise of Escambia County Family Promise of Escambia County
Feeding the Gulf Coast, Inc. Feeding the Gulf Coast
Friends of the West Florida Library, Inc Friends of West Florida Public Library WFPL
Gulf Coast Kids House, Inc Gulf Coast Kid's House
Independence for the Blind of West Florida, Inc Independence for the Blind
Keep Pensacola Beautiful, Inc. (aka Our Corner) Our Corner
Kiwanis Club of Big Lagoon Foundation, Inc. Kiwanis Club of Big Lagoon Pensacola
Magdalene's, Inc. Magdalene's Inc.
Movement for Change, Inc Movement for Change
Pensacola Habitat for Humanity, Inc. Pensacola Habitat for Humanity
ReadyKids! (aka Every Child A Reader in Escambia, Inc) ReadyKids FL
Set Free Refuge, Inc. Set Free Refuge, Inc
Sisters of Hope Corporation Sisters of Hope
STEM Story Corporation STEM Story
The Arc Gateway, Inc The Arc Gateway
The Mylo Foundation, Inc The Mylo Foundation
Transitioning Thru Trauma to Triumph, Inc. Transitioning Thru Trauma To Triumph
Unity Church of Christianity of Pensacola, Florida Unity of Pensacola - Spiritual Community
Whistleblowers of America/Workplace Promise Institute, Inc. Whistleblowers of America

Our hearts are full of such joy to see our members nominate so many amazing organizations!

NOTE: If you are a Powerful Women member, please check your email for the voting form. This form will record your FINAL VOTE for ONLY ONE organization or project to receive the 2022 Member Give Back donation. The organization with the most member votes will be awarded our 2022 Member Give Back winner and will receive a small monetary donation from Powerful Women.

Rethink! It's about NEW information, NEW motivation, NEW connections, and a NEW way of thinking of empowering women! Thank you to our attendees who came out to our November meeting. We missed those of you that couldn't attend.

We also included a scarf exchange in this meeting and our attendees LOVED it and walked away with some super cute finds to add to their wardrobe.

Sign up now for next month's Rethink meeting on December 20th!! We will be doing another scarf exchange!!
Register at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/powerful-women-monthly-rethink-meeting-tickets-374426037357

Thank you to our member, Dawn Grace and Underwood Anderson Insurance for their sponsorship of our Powerful Women Mini-Conference! It's because of like-minded businesses like Underwood Anderson that allow us to do what we do to support women in business.

Underwood Anderson Insurance is an insurance agency who offers both personal and commercial insurance. From their own words:

Our Mission Statement: We will be dedicated to our customers and our community in providing the resources to protect the assets and lifestyles they have worked to achieve. We will strive to educate our customers about the potential risk unique to them and provide products and solutions available to mitigate that risk. We will have a workplace that promotes professionalism in our dealings with our customers and fellow employees.

As insurance professionals, we are committed to helping people just like you find solutions for all your insurance needs. Once we understand your policy needs and goals, we'll work to develop a program tailored to you. Today’s environment can bring concerns, and even, dangers. That's why we work closely with our clients to anticipate these challenges and address them before they happen. Knowledge is power. It’s also the foundation for intelligent, well-considered decisions. When you have questions about which insurance policies are right for you, sound decisions are vital in helping you pursue your goals and protect your future. For many, understanding every aspect of the insurance space can be daunting.

Client Centered: Whether you are looking for help protecting your family, your home, or your assets, our personalized service focuses on your needs, wants, and long-term goals. Our team has years of experience in the insurance industry. We can help you address your needs of today and for many years to come. We look forward to working with you.

For more information about Underwood Anderson Insurance, send them a quick email or call their office. [email protected] | 850-434-5526

If you haven't secured your ticket for this event, tickets are closing soon: https://PowerfulWomenMiniConference.eventbrite.com

A few of us travelled to this week to attend an amazing 3 day conference by our friend and strategic partner, Suzanne Castle! Day one has been so insightful. The content is impactful. It’s deep and there have already been many tears (a lot were mine, I’m constantly working on myself), however I’m so proud of our members Toni Sparks and Marcie Landreth for diving deep into working on themselves so they can be stronger in business and in the world. It’s only when we commit to do the hard work that drives true change and these women are showing up and doing the hard work.

Here’s a few nuggets from today:

“None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an afterthought.”

“Alignment means that what you think, feel, do and say are working toward a common goal.”

“You are not pizza. You will never please everyone, so please try your best not to listen to other’s opinions of us.”

“Embrace your flawsomeness.”

“Action diminishes fear.”

“Stop attaching my worthiness to my work.”

“Is my fear specific enough to create an action plan?”

If these speak to you, we encourage you to follow Suzanne Castle Consulting or check out https://suzannecastle.com/

Hugs! Kolleen Edwards Chesley