Who could have spared Kate her diagnosis? We could have.
Read Brigitte Piniewski’s article on the future of healthcare here.
Maggie Pollock 1946 – 2023
In early October I had a phone call to tell me that my good friend Maggie Pollock had sadly passed away. This was completely unexpected, she had in the past recovered from two major strokes, learnt to speak and walk again. She had just had a knee replacement and was enjoying being pain free and able to get out a bit more.
Maggie was an exceptional person, I first met her when I moved to South Ockendon. She persuaded me to become a school governor, and a year later to take on the role of Chair of Governors, which I did for 8 years.
Maggie was a force in the local community, she raised funds to start the South Ockendon Community Forum and worked tirelessly for many charities and on many projects. Maggie and her daughter Lucy started a children’s nursery and called it Sure Start, this was before the government initiative of the same name. She was incensed when she heard about the name they had chosen for their initiative and even had meetings with Government officials to try and get them to back down or compensate her in some way. There was no stopping Maggie when she was on a mission.
Maggie was my inspiration for the Arts Corner on Mentors for Women. She sent me a couple of poems she had written during lockdown. They made me laugh so much, she had such a great sense of humour. I was thinking about her poems whilst taking my one hour of exercise on my bike. I decided I had to have an Arts corner, so that we could share our members work, whatever that work was. Both my late sisters were artists too, so it also gave me a place to honour them. Thank you Maggie for the inspiration. I will miss our chats and your understanding.
Maggie your work here is done! Rest in Peace.
You can read her poems here
Meet The Mentors
Have a look at our community pages, we have a new page especially for our mentors which you can view here.
Each week we will be publishing a profile of another of our mentors.
Powerful Conversations with Powerful Women
Take a look at Diane Faben talking to Claire Thomas in her Powerful Women Series.
New Website goes live.
We are delighted to announce that our new website is live, in fact if you are reading this, when you must be looking at it!
It has been a long time in the making, and been through at least four iterations, but we finally made it.
Credit where credit is due
At Mentors for Women we believe in giving Credit where credit is due. Why is it so important? So often someone has an idea, that idea is then taken up the management line and subsequently used but the credit is never given to the person whose idea it originally was. Has this happened to you ? Shall we do a poll? That might be fun! We aim to live by this mantra, that’s why we make sure every photograph we use is credited.
Almost all our photographs have been taken by women, and its been a real joy choosing them. We have credited each photographer in the bottom left hand corner of their photograph.
As the new website goes live and our training courses become bookable, I decided it was an excellent opportunity ensure ideas were credited to the people who had them.
Adoption of a Code of Ethics for all members of Mentors for Women – Credit here goes to one of our future Mentors, the very talented Claire Heafford.
Bursaries for Mentoring through the Foundation we are setting up. Initially the idea for the Foundation was only to provide funds for Women Centric Projects – Credit for the extension of this goes to one of our future Mentors, another multi-talented woman Dorigen Hammond.
Sam Chittenden – Working across levels Sam’s idea was to allow mentors to work at a range of rates, which provides mentees with access to a greater pool of resources with a much wider range of expertise and experience, at the appropriate cost. It is also a win for mentors, giving them more mentees to potentially work with.
Design of this website goes to Peter Woolfe. Thanks Peter for all your commitment and hard work on this project, which went beyond design into making our thoughts, ideas and dreams into reality.
A big thank you also goes to our Mentor Manager – Yvette Peart, for the endless hours she has spent reviewing pages and redesigning our old website whilst we waited patiently for the new one to be born.
Training
Training is live and non members can now book on the Training page. All our training is experiential, with the exception of the introductory webinars which are free to members. We intend to keep the online training sessions going but will also be moving into room based training as well. Our training courses are also an opportunity for us to network, share our experiences and learn from one another. After what has after all been such a dark time for many of us, being in a room with other people and sharing will, we imagine, be a real joy.
Meet the mentor
Keep an eye on our people page, where you can meet our Founder Mentors as we introduce them to you.
