HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — A first-of-its-kind event Marshall University will be hosting Friday is bringing in celebrity guest speakers with the full focus of empowering women.
Marshall will host the inaugural Women Warriors Summit at the Mountain Health Arena in Huntington Friday designed to empower local women to tackle courageous conversations, granting them the power to say “NO” and the courage to say “YES.”
Philanthropist and Marshall First Lady Alys Smith said the event became a product of her own inspiration after attending a similar conference in Long Beach, California.
“The First Lady of California Maria Shriver had put on this women’s leadership conference every year, and I was able to attend and was blown away by the kind of speakers, break out sessions, opportunities to purchasing women-owned businesses and services,” Smith said.
The star guests for the event are actress and producer Nichole Kidman, who will be speaking, and award-winning journalist and entrepreneur Soledad O’Brien, the emcee and host of the summit. In addition, co-author of ‘Crucial Conversations’ Emily Gregory and Alys Smith herself are also expected to speak at the event.
Smith said the event serves as a platform for women of Appalachia to access developmental empowerment opportunities and build meaningful relationships. She said this is aimed to help them address longtime issues of imbalance which she had experienced in her own professional life as well as what she observed in other women’s.
“Knowing that women are held back, because, a lot of times they just don’t speak up,” Smith said. “A lot of it is because we have been generationally-conditioned for so long not to speak up, to be the ‘good girl,’ don’t rock the boat, let others speak first, and when we do that, we don’t get the promotion, we don’t get the raises, in fact, we don’t get the better job.”
Smith said many times women’s narrative and self-talk is that they aren’t ready or they don’t have enough experience to do the job, whereas men jump in to it ready or not.
She said the summit isn’t just designed to empower women to have difficult conversations in their careers, however, but in their daily lives and their interpersonal relationships, which could even potentially lead to them impacting many other women for the better.
“When we learn how to do that correctly, we can have more positive outcomes and we can break down the barriers that ignite positive change in our lives, and then when we share these kind of lessons and skills with our communities, we can change generations,” she said.
The summit gets underway at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow, Friday Oct. 6. Smith will deliver the opening remarks at 9 a.m. and Nichole Kidman is expected to speak at approximately 2:35 p.m.
Smith said Kidman has often chosen roles which reflect the empowerment of women, and she felt all of those on Friday’s panel are a testament to what being a woman leader truly means.
“These are all strong women that have lived with their own stories of courage and resilience and each of them have their own stories to share,” Smith said. “And maybe they have had their own courageous conversations in the past, some may have been successful and some of them may have been a great failure, and we all learn, whether it’s a success or a failure we all learn from that.”
Smith said she intends to hold another summit like it next year, as well. While the topic is not yet known she said she plans for it to continue to have an impact on women and to hopefully expand its reach to become even bigger next year.