AYWA Women’s Leadership Academy 2013

Join us for an exciting and powerful new program for Armenia’s greatest resource, its women! From professional development seminars and workshops, to inspirational speeches by female leaders, the goals of the AYWA Women’s Leadership Academy of 2013 are to empower and inspire participants to become more active in their communities and places of work, build regional networks of women professionals, and create new and innovative proposals for projects to be implemented in their communities.

WLA is a joint project between AYWA and the Peace Corps Armenia Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Initiative (GenEq) that will build upon the regional networks of both organizations to enhance the capacity of the talented women located throughout Armenia. The project has three main activities:

Activity 1: Leadership Conference (June 20-­22, 2013)
Slated for June 20-­‐22, 2013, the conference part of the AYWA WLA 2013 intends to bring 50 highly motivated women from across Armenia to Tsakhkadzor to increase personal and community capacities. The conference will span two-­full days of lectures and workshops. Evenings will also be active with dinners and keynote speakers. Based on the results of a survey conducted in January 2013 with over 150 women throughout Armenia participating, the topics of the conference will be based on the highest level of interest, including: networking, negotiation skills, presentation skills, marketing/social media, building successful teams, creating personal development plans, resume/CV writing, how to become an entrepreneur, and personal strengths/testing.

Activity 2: Regional Working Groups (July-­October, 2013)
During the conference, the women will be placed into five different regional working groups composed of 10 women in each group, representing both the public and private sectors. Each group will be assigned a mentor from the AYWA network. The women will build their relationships with one another within their working group during the conference, elect a chair-­woman and develop a solid communication plan with their mentor to continue their collaboration over the next three months.

The purpose of the working groups are twofold:
1) To build a network of women leaders throughout the regions of Armenia to provide support to one another and encourage collaboration as they incorporate their new personal and professional skills learned during the conference;
2) To put the new skills and networks into practice by producing proposals for new and innovative projects to be presented before a panel of experts and/or possible partners in October 2013 in Yerevan.

Participants will be responsible for creating or contributing to a project proposal for their working group, (for a minimum of one large proposal involving all ten women and their communities, or each woman creating an individual proposal for a total of ten separate proposals). The mentors, who will regularly check in with the women to measure their progress, will guide the women. The women will submit the drafts of their proposals to their mentors by September 15th. A volunteer review committee, composed of the mentors, staff of AYWA, representatives of GenEq and panelists/facilitators from the conference, will review the drafts and provide feedback to strengthen the
proposals. The final proposals will be presented in mid-­October at the follow-­up luncheon.

Activity 3: Proposal Presentation Luncheon (Mid-­October, 2013)
The follow-­up luncheon will take place in Yerevan and reunite all the participants and mentors. In addition to sharing their experiences of how the skills and networks they gained from the conference have affected their life and work, they will present their final project proposals before a panel of experts. The panelists will include leaders from NGOs, businesses and other organizations that have an interest in cooperating and collaborating with women throughout the regions of Armenia. This panel will serve as a resource for not only valuable input and feedback on the proposals, but as a potential resource to connect the strongest and most relevant proposals to resources in Armenia that will bring these projects to fruition.

In all, the women participants will receive training enhancing their personal and professional skills, will create a network of highly-­motivated and talented women from across the country, will develop innovative and strong project proposals to bring to their communities and will establish connections
with a number of leaders and established organizations from throughout Armenia. These skills and networks will continue to increase their capacity and empower them to bring positive change to the regions of Armenia.