We are Bring It Impact; an organization helping the younger generation(s) gain confidence, resilience and life skills to become the incredible adults they can be. We began by offering large events and smaller workshops where we feel impact can REALLY be made. And we are (excitedly) evolving.
I’ve had health challenges all my life; almost died at 28; had to deal with confidence issues, body image concerns and anxiety. Fear of failure and judgement kept me from “shining”.
In my own life, I kicked all these fears aside, and thus felt very passionate about helping young girls know that with the right life tools - they too could succeed. Passion over-rode fear and I decided on a one-day confidence conference for girls ages 11-14.
We had tv, radio, academia and financial institutions all supporting us. Local figure skating celebrity Tessa Virtue even sent a personal video to the girls from Japan! Women of all ages came in droves to help. We had free tickets and were able to offer those to girls who couldn't afford the conference. We had 80 girls attend from CAS, Merrymount, BGC, etc and were so touched when we reached out to the Cross Cultural Learning Centre to see if any new refugees would attend. Eight came and had an Arabic-speaking Bring It Guide assigned to each. After the conference, one Guide approached us and said how these girls were her 4 years ago. Lots of tears!
Thus. Bring It was born!
We wish to inspire, motivate and build confidence in young adults of today.
As a Health, Life, and NLP Coach working with women I understand the challenges young women are facing today. My Coaching is my (passionate!) work; Bring It fills my bucket.
It’s a challenge however. I “feel” for people in an unusually large way and work out of love with this; taking much time away from my “actual” job. I need balance. To be able to do both without losing momentum and without my health and family life being affected. I’m out to make a difference, yet need to balance it all.
Support for what we are doing has been incredible. I am so genuinely grateful to Pillar Nonprofit Network and Innovation Works who are so supportive! I have a wonderfully supportive network of cheerleaders and a loving, supportive family. (starting to sound like an Oscar acceptance speech?!)
September 30th at King’s University College is our next venture. It’s for ANYone.
This is our FIRST Co-ed event! We are putting it out there to see if it sticks. My goal? To create more workshops based on what the young adults want/need.
Body image and Self love are hugely important to me with way too many suffering somewhere on the scale of both. I will continue to offer workshops to young women first, starting at Western; hoping to begin going around the Residences. Would love to do them for free; will begin this way, but can’t always. So, I'm figuring out new ways to generate revenue for greater impact.
But it is not without it's challenges.
I'll be honest, I need help. When we do events, we do them out of love. We do not make money to cover costs with tickets. I want to find a way to reach organizations to provide workshops to young adults where this “sings”to them, to enable us to cover costs to those who DEFINITELY need to be there. It’s a learning curve! We know our impact is needed; just need to get it out there.
And we will.
This blog post was originally posted on the Social Enterprise SouthWest website. Pillar Nonprofit Network is the lead organization responsible for Social Enterprise Southwest, our regional Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs (ONE) Social Enterprise partnership. Learn more here.