Girl Up Sydney’s journey began in December 2020 with the vision to educate and empower young women to rise up and become the leaders of tomorrow. It is at that point, in December, that we first started thinking about creating an event that would propel us towards this vision. At first, our goal was to fundraise for some great causes. Alongside that overarching goal, we also wanted to create an event that would help empower and create opportunities for students in our community. In the midst of the unprecedented events that we are living through, with much of the world’s economies struggling, we found a real need amongst the students in our community for help and guidance from experts.
Thus, Career Fest 2021 was conceived – a series of workshops on career development, industry awareness, and networking opportunities that had been 3 months in the making –and finally came to fruition this March.
Our team worked to bring highly qualified global industry professionals to speak at the event and help alleviate student’s anxieties about the future by equipping them with expert knowledge and insights. The week-long event kicked off with 3 days of workshops on various business specializations, with speakers including Shrinivas Shikaripurkar, Anil Mehrotra, and Nilay Pandey speaking on finance; Karamjit Mangat, Kai West-Schlosser, and Felipe Quintana conducting workshops on marketing; and Natasja Pagulayan, Dr. Edward Kachab, and Jennifer Sault sharing insights on entrepreneurship. On Day 4, we had two wonderful consultants, Dr. Vinaya Shetty and Gordon Tredgold, generously donate their time for 1-on-1 career consultation with the students. Gordon went above and beyond by sharing his brilliant book, ‘FAST: 4 Principles Every Business Needs to Achieve Success and Drive Results’ at a discounted price, with all proceeds going towards the fundraising efforts. Finally, we closed Career Fest with an intimate round table discussion about the complex realities of entering the world at this difficult time, with Rohan Bhatia, Anushka Khemka, Janani Venkataraman, Ketaki Verma, and Pragati Jain.
This whole event was driven by the immense kindness and generosity of people who wanted to give back and help others. We were also able to collaborate with Elearnmarkets & StockEdge to offer a free course on financial markets to participants in order to help educate and enable young adults to be financially independent. To add to this outpouring of kindness from our community, we also received donations from anonymous donors to sponsor 10 students from Katalyst India – an NGO in India that educates young girls from low-income communities!
Team Girl Up Sydney is honored to be a part of this movement and to receive such overwhelming support, which has allowed us to raise 800 AUD in donations to One Girl, International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA), and Women’s Community Shelters.
