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Women on the Move started in 2003 with a lunch with Gayle Hogan (previously Head of the CIB) on International Women’s Day at Gip’s Restaurant. This function was an initiative of the Queensland Department of State Development and was sponsored by a number of local businesses.
What became overwhelmingly obvious following this lunch was that women wanted more of the same! They wanted to opportunity to hear from speakers like Gayle. They wanted the opportunity to meet more women in a friendly, non-threatening environment. They wanted Women on the Move.
A small committee started things off soon after with a morning of workshops and seminars followed by a lunch, with June Dally-Watkins. (Apart from making a lot of us feel very self conscious about how we were sitting, holding our glass or speaking … again the resounding feedback was MORE PLEASE!). The Southern Inland Queensland Area Consultative Committee, through its Small Business Field Officer program have hosted and supported the network since its inception.
More women were ‘encouraged’ onto the organising committee and regular monthly networking sessions started. In the beginning we coerced local restaurants, pubs, coffee shops to provide us with drinks at a standard price and put on some finger food for us … today we have businesses asking us if they can host our monthly networking.
We keep these casual on purpose! We don’t want to duplicate or take away from the activities that other networking groups are doing and what our members wanted was the opportunity to network in a casual environment and that’s why we do it this way! We usually get one or two ladies to speak about themselves, the job, their business (whatever!) for a few minutes – it’s hard to monitor the outcomes of this, but we know of many of our ‘speakers’ that have been swamped with follow up calls because they introduced themselves at one of our networking events!
Apart from this we hold one ‘signature’ event during the year. Our birthday party takes the form of a cocktail function on International Women’s Day in early March and is commonly referred to as the "Secrets of Success".
The “Secrets of Success” has become an institution – Success comes in many different forms and over the years we’ve heard the stories of some truly wonderful women at this event. Our ‘secrets’ lunch has a definite local feeling with women from our own region speaking about themselves. We’ve laughed and cried along with our speakers at these lunches.
In 2010, Women on the Move became incorporated with a membership base of (to be continued)
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