Women's SERVE Conference

Since March, we have been spending a great deal of our time planning a women’s business conference here in our city. For those of you that don’t know, we work for a company here that does business training. Although this is completely out of our skill sets and comfort zones, we’re learning a lot. In our weakness, He is strong!

There are many women here in business, but I don’t think anyone has ever done a conference just for women here in the Middle East. The women loved it! We had a great response. We had approximately 75 women attend!

Our company here has a partnership with Chick-fil-A and their Winshape foundation. Each year Chick-fil-A sends us a team to lead a S.E.R.V.E. conference, in which they teach their leadership model. This year (our 3rd SERVE conference), we decided to go with all women. So, Chick-fil-A sent us an awesome team of women, along with Trudy Cathy White (daughter of Chick-fil-A’s founder). We had a blessed time getting to know them as we took them sightseeing and worked together to pull up all the loose ends of this conference.

One of the most challenging and most exciting things about this conference was that we received royal patronage for our event. Because this was an all women’s conference and I am the only women on our team, our boss insisted that I be the one to introduce the Her Royal Highness at the conference. I was SO nervous! The princess was very down to earth and so gracious! After I introduced her, as she came up to speak, she took a minute to shake my hand and tell me what I great job I had done planning the conference! WOW! She was so sweet! She was also gracious enough to allow all of us at the conference to take a picture with her.

This is me, introducing Her Royal Highness, Princess Basma Bint Talal!

I know, I'm a little fuzzy, but I couldn't help bet post this one.

This is me with Her Royal Highness, Mrs. Trudy White, and the amazing team of local, like-minded women that helped us pull this thing off! Their insight into the culture was invaluable. We couldn’t have done it without them.

Here's our business team with the Whites and Her Royal Highness

One of our hopes is to build a women’s forum with the women who attended the conference where they could come together and discuss struggles for women in leadership here in our city and its surroundings. We’re looking forward to getting these women into this smaller group and really getting to know them.

This picture appeared on the 2nd page of the major English newspaper in our country!

Please remember these women. They were exposed to some wonderful, “like-minded” women presenters who bore them their hearts. My hope is that we will get to explain a little more about why those women have such joy!