Page 10 - BPW-UK - E-news - Edition 104 - July 2022

It was a lovely summer evening in London as I walked from Waterloo to Kings College where I
met our Young BPW representative Yasmin Knight. There must have been at least one hundred
people there, of which many were women - great to see that.

We started networking straight away. One person in particular caught my attention
and interest the most: Esther Wiskerke, founder of the Social Enterprise called
‘Symbiosia’.
After several years and much frustration working in social care, she decided to
take the first step into creating a fun, sustainable, nature focused organisation
that creates events for care patients and their families, usually in green spaces.
For more information, please see the link below.

https://symbiosia.org.uk/

As for the speeches, what can I say? To have not one but two former prime ministers
only a few feet away from us ………...!

Sir John Major’s speech was heavily focused on the Ukraine crisis; what I took from
it is that democracy is not something inevitable, we must constantly review and cre-
ate policies which will help protect it. An example he gave is that the EU has decid-
ed to change their policies regarding energy, not to have to rely on foreign energy
so much.

The second speaker was Dame Louise Casey, she is an independent advisor for social
policy and Chair of the Institute of Global Homelessness.

She spoke about reducing rough sleeping and that one of the gifts of a policy insti-
tute is the gift of getting it right without being political. She also mentioned that is
very difficult to work your way out of poverty hence policies being so important.
However, sometimes when you just ‘crack on’ you are just doing but not solving. So, policies
must be reviewed and re-evaluated constantly.

Finally, Australian former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, what an inspirational
woman! After her speech she just hung around chatting with everyone. We were
very lucky to get some one-to-one time with her afterwards! We spoke about
BPW UK, BPW International, about the Conference in Iceland what we learned
there and just how great our organisation is!

Once again, I was blown away by how incredibly well connected our organisation is, how we
get to be invited to such powerful events. Thank you, Jo for asking us represent you, and thank
you BPW UK!

Marina Leal Freitas

BPW-LASE