On things coming along in threes

Well, it’s all very strange; suddenly, offers to get engaged with various gender related organisations in the not-for-profit space seem to be popping up all over.

Like buses, three at a time.

First came the Downing Street Project (DSP), with which I am involved in some as yet to be defined way. So far, this has simply entailed helping to organise meeting room space for c. 80 people on two dates: next week and then again on 1st September. But I am having dinner tonight with one of the Directors, so perhaps my role will become clearer over a salad at Joe Allen. There are currently four teams, working as follows:

- Defining the DSP’s key messages and associated media strategy;
- Designing the leadership training;
- Creating the strategy, the organisational structure and roles and responsibilities;
- Fund raising!

And, although I’m not officially in any given team, I hope that I can be helpful in some way to all four workstreams. Watch this space.

Then on Monday, I received a call from a woman, Priya, whom I met in India last year, when I was speaking at NASSCOM’s Women in Leadership Summit in Bangalore. We’ve kept in touch since then and she has invited me to join something called the “Global Women’s Leadership Forum”, which she is setting up. Am waiting to receive more info about that. I’m passionately interested in the issues and challenges which face women in India (I’ll blog more about this shortly) and so I’d love to do something which supported them.

And finally today I was asked if I’d be interested in joining the London chapter’s Advisory Board of the European Professional Women’s Network (EPWN) – and discovered whilst talking about it (and frantically finding the website) that the existing advisory board members are also involved with the DSP.

As my granny always says: “it’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to clean it …”

What is quite interesting, though, is that I am very aware that these organisations do primarily want me because of my current role in which I run the (award winning, yet!) global gender diversity programme of a multi-national firm. So there’s presumably a sense in which they’ll get two for the price of one – a human form of BOGOF – if I join a board, as it affiliates my employer and me with the board in question. But, because I know that I am shortly to be leaving my esteemed employer … I feel forced to explain, in some cases sooner than I would have liked, that I will shortly be outta there and that, whilst I am happy to be asked and possibly to work with them – it would have to be as me rather than in a corporate capacity.

But what has been very gratifying has been that all three entities have all welcomed me on board, even though I have bent over backwards to give them a get out clause if they want one.

My hope from all of this is that I will be able to find a way to work on gender projects which I love, whilst finding a perfect job and keeping my network strong and relevant.

But all of this reminds me that I do have to get some sense, and very soon, of what is happening work wise and timeline wise, before I go mad with the uncertainty of it all.

Tags: Networking