REGION OF WATERLOO CELEBRATES INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 2022 WITH THREE DAYS OF FREE VIRTUAL EVENT PROGRAMS
Women in Communications and Technology — Waterloo Region Chapter to host three online events celebrating, educating and empowering women
WATERLOO, ON | FEBRUARY 24, 2022 — In celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, Women in Communications and Technology — Waterloo Region Chapter (WCT-WR) is partnering with various community organizations to host three virtual events during the month of March featuring some of the Region’s most notable female leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators.
Centered around the 2022 campaign theme #BreakTheBias, participants will share personal stories of overcoming stereotypes and discrimination in the workplace. There will also be live panel discussions on empowering women in healthcare and education, achieving financial independence and assessing overall perceptions of women in society, culture and the workplace.
“Women have made tremendous progress in advancing gender equality and challenging existing gender stereotypes, but there is more work to be done,” said Sherry Shannon-Vanstone, CEO of Profound Impact Corporation and Founder of WCT-WR. “With the pandemic posing serious risks to women’s progress in the workforce, empowering and educating women is more important than ever.”
(TORONTO, ONTARIO — March 8, 2022) A group of Canadian women in technology have launched Phoenix Fire, an angel stage investment fund with a systematic approach to investing in women entrepreneurs across Canada. The fund will invest $100K to $250K in early-stage technology start-ups with high-growth potential and the ability to scale globally. Phoenix Fire is powered by Archangel Network, which launched in 2020 with a first close of $10 million.
The women of Phoenix Fire, also known as “The Firehood™” consists of over a dozen women with diverse backgrounds, mostly in technology. Founding members include Sherry Shannon-Vanstone, Founder and CEO of Profound Impact.
Happy Women’s History Month! March is a time to celebrate the countless women who have made significant contributions to our society. This year, we’re honouring women in a month-long celebration who #BreakTheBias and have a Profound Impact™ on communities globally. From scientists and entrepreneurs to artists and activists, women have broken barriers to inspire the next generation of leaders and prove that the possibilities are limitless.
The first event of this month-long celebration was held on March 1, 2022, in collaboration with the Women in Communications and Technology Waterloo Region (WCT-WR) and 15 other organizations from across the Waterloo Region including Perimeter Institute, Vidyard and OpenText. This event was hosted on WCT-WR’s Women Empowering Women’s Digital Community powered by Profound Impact. Highlighting this year’s theme – #BreakTheBias, the opening event featured several esteemed speakers: Bardish Chagger, MP Waterloo, Jean Becker, Associate Vice-President, Indigenous Relations, University of Waterloo; Deborah MacLatchy, President, Wilfrid Laurier University; Madhu Ranganathan, EVP, CFO, OpenText and Kate Paul, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Manager, Bruce Power on how they have overcome bias in their respective industries.
Don’t worry if you missed the March 1st event (watch the recording here!); the second will be on March 8th, International Women’s Day, beginning at 12:00 PM EST (register here). Last year’s successful online event drew nearly 400 participants from all across Waterloo Region and demonstrated how virtual gatherings can be a powerful tool for learning and connecting people.
We will conclude the month-long celebration with an event on March 22nd, beginning at 12:00 PM EST (register here) with a conversation about a topic that is extremely important to me – Angel Investing and Early Stage Funding for Women Owned/Founded Businesses . To discover more about these upcoming events, discussion subjects, and panelists, I encourage you to visit the Women Empowering Women platform for the most recent information. To further participate in the discussion and share your impact, register on the platform here.
Our March Impact Story highlights a woman who is breaking barriers for women in the world of crypto, Web3 and NFTs — Janelle Hraiki Chalouhi, Co-Founder of Venuseverse. Please continue to read the rest of our Profound Connections newsletter to learn more about the first Canadian female-founded, female-focused educational program, incubator and NFT collection as well as how Janelle is using this opportunity to help women increase their digital financial literacy.
An entrepreneur and innovator on a mission to promote gender equity and digital literacy, Janelle Chalouhi is committed to empowering women to advance in the next-generation wealth economy. Chalouhi is the CEO and co-founder of Venusverse, Canada’s first female-founded, female-focused educational program, incubator and NFT collection, with the goal of closing the gender gap and removing barriers to entry for women in the Web3 domain. Through educational and networking sessions, a Web3b incubator platform, and their own collection of NFTs, Chalouhi believes that Venusverse will provide women with valuable insights and opportunities to participate in the emerging digital economy with confidence.
“Only five per cent of women in Canada are in the crypto and NFT space…that’s a big Canadian problem,” said Chalouhi, who co-founded Venusverse with Natalie Dumond. “The whole digital economy is being created with very few women engaging in it. This is a fundamental equality issue that has to be solved.”
Prior to launching Venusverse in early 2022, Chalouhi worked in fundraising and business development for archdioceses, universities, hospitals and non-profit organizations. She was the Director of Community Counseling Service (CCS) Fundraising, working with the archdiocese of Washington and Boston on fundraising campaigns. She also worked in senior management positions at Hofstra University, the Westchester Medical Center, Saint George Hospital University Medical Center, University of Balamand and the University of Waterloo. In these roles, Chalouhi was responsible for fostering strong relationships and partnerships that contributed to infrastructure upgrades, new programming, and other operational improvements.
Chalouhi also served as the Vice President of Business Development at Communitech, a Waterloo-based innovation center helping companies start, grow, and succeed. In her role with Communitech, Chalouhi helped co-create and lead Canada’s first ever $1-million Leaders Prize, a competition that explored the use of artificial intelligence to identify “fake news” and limit the spread of misinformation across the globe. She has also been a big advocate for shining a light on the people and technologies that are making the world a better place, which aligns with Communitech “Tech for Good” mandate that Chalouhi contributed to as a part of her role with the True North Conference.
“It’s about helping companies figure out how they can make a difference and align to something meaningful to them in the process,” said Chalouhi. “I think every single company should build in an ESG (environmental social governance) component into the work that they are doing. At its core, it’s giving back — and that’s the only way we’re going to be able to help make a broader dent and impact.”
The founders are leading by example by collaborating with Profound Impact™ Corporation and CivicAction Leadership Foundation, to build a community where women are empowered with the knowledge required to advance successfully in the next-generation wealth economy. Ten per cent of revenue from the Venusverse NFT collection will be donated to CivicAction in support of women in the organization’s leadership programs including the DiverseCity fellows and the Emerging Leaders Network.
“I really hope we get to a point where this (gender) gap is closed significantly,” said Chalouhi, referring to the NFT and cryptocurrency space. “Building the confidence of women is really what we want to see happen. Ideally, we want women to be more aware of the digital world that’s being created in Web3. We also want them to be more confident and independent with their finances, making their own money and feeling good with not having to hustle day in and day out — running from dropping off the kids to their job, back and forth. Ultimately, we want more women to be in a place of peace.”
Chalouhi’s approach to cultivating an environment that embraces women’s involvement in the digital economy ties directly into this year’s International Women’s Day theme, #BreakTheBias. This theme celebrates the potential for a gender equal world, free of bias, stereotypes and discrimination that can hold women back in their personal and professional lives — an experience that Chalouhi is all too familiar with in her life. “I’ve seen a lot in my life…I have experienced quite a bit throughout my life and career — everything you can think of, name it, but at the end of the day, those experiences have helped shape me and have brought me to where I am right now, helped me grow as a person and allowed me to have very different perspectives than many others,” she said. “Of course I’ve experiences discrimination anywhere I have lived in the world, however, due to my vast experiences and perspectives, the discrimination has never gotten in my way and for that I’m grateful”.
Chalouhi will be joining the Profound Impact team as an advisor in partnership engagement. You can view some of Chalouhi’s accomplishments in the images below:
Do you have an impact story to share? Reach out to us at connections@profoundimpact.com for a chance to have your story featured in an upcoming newsletter!
Welcome to our February edition of Profound Connections!
Our team at Profound Impact™ has been busy working on our upcoming webinar in partnership with Wilfrid Laurier University. I’m pleased to let you know that on Tuesday, February 22, 2022, at 12:00 pm EST, we will be hosting our first Profound Insights webinar of 2022: ‘How to Effectively Communicate and Match Research Funding Opportunities’.
Towards the end of 2021, our team partnered with Wilfrid Laurier University and their research department to better understand how Research Service Offices (RSO) across Canada communicate grant opportunities, partnerships and research policies. Searching for insight into how research across Canada is conducted effectively, we surveyed 23+ universities and research institutions and received 40 responses from across the country!
Our upcoming webinar will be able to provide insights into how RSOs can more effectively communicate and match research funding opportunities. Moderated by our very own Sherryl Petricevic, Account Executive, we will be discussing the findings of our Research Matching Survey and highlighting key takeaways from the report with our panellists Dr. Jonathan Newman, Vice President of Research, Wilfrid Laurier University, Shawna Reibling, Knowledge Mobilization Officer, Wilfrid Laurier University, and Rob Darling, Strategic Advisor, Profound Impact.
Know someone who might be interested? Please invite them to attend and RSVP through our registration page here. Webinar attendees will be provided with a free copy of the final Research Matching Survey report.
Thank you for your ongoing support, and I look forward to seeing you all on February 22nd for our first Profound Insights webinar of the year. Additionally, our team, in partnership with WCT Waterloo Region, looks forward to hosting you for a series of virtual events held exclusively on our Profound Impact platform throughout the month of March to celebrate International Women’s Day 2022: #BreakTheBias and the women in our Waterloo Region community. For more information, read on and check out the IWD 2022 WR webpage hosted on WCT WR’s Women Empowering Women Digital Community to stay up to date with all of the latest information about panelists, conversation topics and entertainment.
A dedicated team builder with a passion for data and analytics, Cindy Forbes has cemented her legacy as an innovator and strategic thinker, challenging the status quo to facilitate growth in all facets of her professional life. Before retiring last year, Forbes was the first female Chief Actuary at Manulife Financial, tasked with leading a global actuarial team responsible for ensuring the financial stability of the company. She was also the company’s first female Chief Financial Officer for Manulife Asia, leading the finance, risk management and actuarial functions across 11 countries.
“I always want to make a positive impact, meaning that I want to leave the department or the organization better than I found it,” she said.
From digitization to integration of data and analytics into Manulife’s operations, Forbes was an invaluable asset to the modernization of Canada’s largest insurance company. She initiated a project to move the company’s valuation into the cloud – a first among insurance companies in Canada. The same project rewrote Manulife’s liability valuation systems to reduce the amount of manual work required by actuaries, significantly improving quality control over the valuation of the companies liabilities, which at the time were close to $300-billion. Forbes also built the company’s global artificial intelligence and advanced analytics function from the ground up. Within four years, that “function” has become a global organization of over 200 people responsible for building and embedding advanced analytics models into the business, delivering insights and driving financial impact.
Forbes’ motivation for her work stems from a number of factors, including her desire for continuous improvement, as well as her commitment to mentorship for young professionals.
“I like to help young professionals achieve their potential, be a positive role model, coach them, remove obstacles, show them how to get things done,” she said. “Largely it’s about creating a high performance team – a team that pulls together, that’s based on trust, and can make the very difficult look quite easy.”
Many of the talented team members she has hired have been students from the University of Waterloo, where Forbes obtained her Math degree, specializing in actuarial science. Forbes was in the co-op program, which allows students to gain paid work experience, completing six work terms during her five years at Waterloo. She credits the program for providing the necessary professional experience to help her find a job in the field post-graduation and to make more intelligent, informed career decisions.
“It really sets you up for success in terms of learning about the workplace and putting into focus what you were learning at school,” she said.
Forbes remains a fervent supporter of the University of Waterloo, having served as Chair of the Board since May 2017. In her role as board chair, Forbes successfully led the recruitment of a new President for the University, engaging a large group of external governors, faculty, staff and students. She is currently leading a review of the university’s governance framework, identifying opportunities for the board to be more effective and have greater impact and oversight of the university’s strategic planning.
In addition to her role as board chair at the University of Waterloo, Forbes also serves on the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board. She additionally held the role of Special Advisor to the Premier of Ontario from February to January 2022, providing advice and guidance on creating more digital, responsive and flexible public services. This includes the digitization of court proceedings and enabling on-line renewal of drivers licenses and health cards.
A natural innovator and life-long learner, Forbes remains highly attuned to global, economic and technological trends that will impact businesses and corporations worldwide. The pandemic accelerated trends that were already in place in terms of digitization, use of data to customize experiences and growing concerns about the implications of the same. Her prediction is that the acceleration of these trends will continue against a backdrop of growing geo-political tensions.
“It is going to be interesting to see how this all plays out and how global corporations navigate the changes ahead,” she said.
You can view some of Forbes’ accomplishments in the images below:
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Do you have an impact story to share? Reach out to us at connections@profoundimpact.com for a chance to have your story featured in an upcoming newsletter!
FROM THE RELEASE: To make an even greater impact in gender equity, the founders of Venusverse are collaborating with Profound Impact™ Corporation and CivicAction, to build a community where women are empowered with the knowledge required to advance successfully in the next-generation wealth economy. In true community-building fashion, Chalouhi will join Profound Impact Corporation as an advisor in partnership engagement. Profound Impact is a Toronto-Waterloo innovation corridor-based startup that helps education, research and social impact community organizations leverage data to measure program impact, tell their stories and inform strategies.
“Our collaboration with Venusverse aligns perfectly with our long-term stakeholder engagement strategy,” said Sherry Shannon-Vanstone, founder and CEO of Profound Impact Corporation. “Venusverse will use Profound Impact’s business intelligence and engagement tools to measure the increased involvement of women in NFT, Web3 and crypto. Our shared goal is to measure the global impact of connecting great people to do great work in these growing fields.”
How to Effectively Communicate and Match Research Funding Opportunities – February 22, 2022 12:00 noon
Missed the event? You can listen to the recording of this webinar as well as view previous Profound Insights events by visiting us at demo.profoundimpact.com/profound-insights.
Join special guests Jonathan Newman, Vice President of Research, and Shawna Reibling, Knowledge Mobilization Officer at Wilfrid Laurier University, along with Rob Darling, Strategic Advisor at Profound Impact for insights on research matching and communication challenges between universities, research organizations and funding bodies.
Profound Impact, in partnership with Wilfrid Laurier University’s Office of Research Services unit, recently set out to better understand how Research Services Offices (RSO) across Canada communicate funding opportunities, partnership opportunities, and research policies to faculty members and other university/research institute stakeholders. Profound Impact and Laurier partnered on a national survey in the 4th quarter of 2021 to gain a deeper understanding of how research service units and staff communicate funding opportunities and received 40 responses from over 23 universities and research institutions across Canada.
Led by moderator Sherryl Petricevic from Profound Impact, this Profound Insights webinar will discuss the findings of the survey and how to effectively communicate and match research funding opportunities, highlighting:
How the survey was conducted, participation and methodology
A discussion of the problems facing RSO staff to match funding opportunities with researchers and communicate with internal and external stakeholders
Findings from the report and key takeaways
Webinar attendees will be provided with a copy of the final survey report.
Don’t forget to add this event to your calendar and visit https://demo.profoundimpact.com/#/profound-insights on the day of to access the webinar!
Profound Impact’s Sherryl Petricevic will be a panelist in an upcoming GEDI Exchange webinar on the workforce of tomorrow. A workforce with relevant skills is the “air supply” on which Canada’s economy of the future will depend. But how to ensure alignment between employee education and the job market? Our guests this month use current student and alumni data to help colleges, universities, research institutes, and social profit organizations strategically optimize the type and content of the programs and services they deliver to the communities they serve.
Profound Impact and 1Mentor use data-driven insights to find and understand the key indicators for workplace progression and opportunities to improve candidate success. This information in turn is used to evaluate programming content and delivery, which is all the more important as it becomes increasingly critical to be “students for life”: many jobs today didn’t exist 10-20+ years ago, and the pace of change is accelerating, particularly in technical fields. It’s time to use the latest and greatest analytical tools and artificial intelligence techniques on the education system itself.
Happy New Year and welcome to the first 2022 edition of Profound Connections!
I hope that you all had a restful holiday season. With a new year underway, the team here at Profound Impact™ can’t wait to share with you what we have planned for 2022 but before we do that…let’s look back at 2021.
To close out 2021, our team launched a new initiative: 12 Days of Impact, designed to encourage people and organizations to contribute their time, resources and talents to help address local challenges. Our 12 Days of Impact calendar outlined daily challenges that focused on spreading the giving spirit during the holiday season. Not only did our team members at Profound Impact contribute to these daily challenges, but as an organization, we took it one step further.
Through our efforts, we were able to give back to organizations doing vital work in our greater community. Additionally, based on the social media engagement and votes of our followers, Profound Impact was able to support Actua, Canada’s largest STEM outreach organization. Profound Impact’s contribution will support the delivery of impactful hands-on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experience to youth across Canada. Many youth including Indigenous youth, girls, and at-risk youth face barriers that prevent access to education opportunities. Through Actua’s national inclusion and diversity programs, they are hard at work to remove these barriers.
Now on to 2022…coming in March is International Women’s Day (IWD) 2022 with the theme #BreakTheBias. We are thrilled to once again be working with the Women in Communications and Technology Waterloo Region Chapter (WCT WR) and 18 other organizations representing this vibrant community to present during the month of March several IWD 2022 events and amplify over 10 other events in celebration of women in the Waterloo Region.
For more information on this event and additional exciting news from our team, read on and enjoy this edition of Profound Connections!
