WITHIT's WOW President's Award: An Honor To Receive
WITHIT stands for W.omen I.n T.he H.ome I.ndustries T.oday and was formed almost 30 years ago now. It is the USA’s premier networking and leadership development organization for women in the home industries.
In 2009, I was genuinely SHOCKED and SURPRISED when my name was called out by then President, Liz O’ Brien, at the WOW awards ceremony that year and given WITHIT’s WOW President’s Award, in recognition of my significant contributions to the building of WITHIT and fulfillment of its mission.
THE BACKSTORY:
When I started my business, 24 years ago, it was the first organization I joined during my first trip to High Point Market as a new business owner.
At that time, Sara Lyke was the executive director and she introduced me to such wonderful female executives, several of whom were instrumental in opening doors for me, mentoring me, and creating opportunities for me.
Sara asked me to be the volunteer chair of WITHIT’s 2008 national leadership and education conference. I had never done anything like that before, but Sara promised she would guide me, so I accepted.
It ended up being a life changing experience as it led to a huge client for my [then] new business. The client was Cargill’s BiOH Poylols unit, a division of the largest privately held company in the USA. That put my agency on the national map in Year 1.
One of their executives, Jessica Koster, was a sponsor of the conference, attended it and unbeknownst to me at that time, was seeking a social media agency to manage consumer and trade marketing for their raw ingredient soy polyol product.
I was invited back to chair the conference the following year, which I also did.
It was, and still is, such an honor to be a WOW President’s Award recipient along with all the women and one man in the image below.
Over the ensuing years, I’ve now had the opportunity to provide mentoring to the younger women that have come up behind me.
In recognition of this, in 2016 I was a finalist for WITHIT’s WOW Mentoring award [that’s me in the white jacket below] and although I didn’t win it that year, {Renee Loper Boyd did ] it was wonderful to know that my peers and professional colleagues recognized how hard I had worked to pay what I had been given, forward.
I’m very grateful for all of the wonderful women and men who are part of WITHIT and although I’m not as actively invovled now as I have been in the past, I’ve made wonderful lifelong friends through WITHIT and am profoundly grateful to the 3 women who founded WITHIT:
Jena Hall, Peggy Traub and Kimberly Wray.
See WITHIT’s history timeline here. It’s fun to look back and see how far WITHIT has come and how many opportunities this organization has created for women like me and so many others.
Many thanks to current WITHIT executive director, Amy Van Dorp, who used to work for Sara, and has now run WITHIT so beautifully for many years.
If you want to connect with the women [ and men ] who are the movers and shakers on the manufacturing side of the furniture industry, this is the organization to join. You will be glad you did.
Tell Amy I sent you….
Leslie Carothers
Principal, Savour Partnership
Connect with me here on LinkedIn
