Women, Business & Politics

Women, Business & Politics - Personal experience & structural change. 

Join us at Coast Lab for an evening of drinks, nibbles, and honest conversations about what it takes to thrive as women in business in Aotearoa NZ. 

Women are launching businesses at record rates, but are often left without the structural support to match. We’re bringing together a Member of Parliament, a circular-economy founder, and a community business leader & mother to ask the big questions. We’ll discuss: supporting the creative economy, community collaboration, innovation for social and climate justice, and the role policy plays in closing the motherhood gap & lifting the barriers that women in business face every day. 

Panellists: Suia Westbrook - Coast Lab, Force Femme, Camilla Belich MP for Labour, Michal Garvey - founder of FoodPrint. 

Michal Garvey ~ Foodprint - On Innovation, social & climate justice: Navigating the "circular economy"; the reality of funding for female founders and how business can be a tool for social & climate justice. 

Suia Westbrook ~ Coast Lab & Force Femme - On community: The necessity of collaborative spaces like CoastLab to break the isolation of solo-entrepreneurship and "Force Femme" as an alternative to traditional networking and community building whilst navigating motherhood.

Camilla Belich ~ MP for Labour - Policy focus: Closing the "motherhood gap" through ECE funding, and paid maternity leave, how pay equity, employment law, and KiwiSaver can better protect contractors and self-employed women too.