leadership

Holly is WIMDI's Founder and CEO. She is the brains and beauty behind the WIMDI community and spends her time setting the group's directon, leading WIMDI's many volunteers, and ensuring WIMDI remains a powerful force that helps women have delicious careers.

Holly is a former mining engineer, leadership coach, and diversity & inclusion consultant who has dedicated her career to making the working world more equal in male-dominated industries. She works one-on-one with ambitious women to help them lead, get promoted, and create the careers they actually want in industries they love. Holly partners with companies to help them retain and advance diverse staff by creating tangible, results-oriented change to their internal systems and biases.

Holly is in love with Friday by Rebecca Black and actually makes a habit of listening to it weekly, while partying, partying (yeah!). She thinks that it's fun fun fun fun and it makes her look forward to the weekend.

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Daneeka helps with researching new initiatives and ideas! In particular, she's collating feasibility and costing information for new WIMDI initiatives. Overall, she aims to make it easier for WIMDI to assess and implement awesome programs for our members.

Daneeka works as a construction project manager for Halse-Martin Construction, primarily working on complex institutional and commercial renovations. She helps connect the site work with the design, allowing her to get down and dirty on site once in a while. She loves learning new methods and and getting fresh insights from her team, and is excited to bring that energy to WIMDI projects.

When she can, Daneeka loves performing. Whether it's singing in a choir, or volunteering in an acting troupe, the stage is her alternate calling. When she can't quite make in on stage, a karaoke night always scratches the itch.

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Angela, our resident law nerd, helps WIMDI with all of its legal needs so it can keep producing great content while we avoid angering the legal gods.

As a litigation lawyer, Angela is passionate advocating for her clients. She's an employment lawyer who helps individuals with wrongful dismissals, human rights complaints, contract reviews and negotiations, and anything where an employer is being sketchy. She also works with small businesses on commercial and tax disputes.

In her spare time, Angela enjoys glamping, eating carbs, and obsessing over dogs.

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Tiffany is WIMDI's speaker coach, working behind the scenes with each presenter to create a talk that comes to life. If you’ve attended a WIMDI presentation, then you’ve experienced the product of the focused, yet wild work that goes into crafting our signature engaging content, impactful design and awesome-sauce delivery to a wicked cool crowd.

Tiffany’s passion and full-time mission is facilitating businesses to find success at the intersection of heart and goal. She does this through her business NorthWild Leadership, which creates kickass culture programs for conscious corporations that are scaling. Unconventional and rad, she is part of a moving branch of training & development that is disrupting traditional HR and learning methods.

Tiffany is one of the rare born & bred Vancouverites. Though the city of sea & sky is where her heart lies, she inherited an insane wanderlust that has taken her to all 7 continents and over 30 countries. Whether it’s about where to find the most delicious chai in the world, where to see the most colourful reefs, and everything in between, Tiffany can’t wait to hear all about your own global experiences and go down the rabbit hole of travel-talk with you.

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Ivanna is part of the Speaker Coach Team at WIMDI. She empowers presenters to be confident in themselves and in their amazing stories.

Ivanna is a Product Designer at a Digital Media company where she blends her passion for entertainment and UX Design. She is also a Digital Literacy Educator, teaching individuals to understand digital products and services.

Ivanna comes from a creative background, being trained as a professional actor. When Ivanna is not designing or educating, she can be found on-screen in films and TV shows, performing Spoken Word Poetry, or sharpening her photography and video editing skills.

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Jen's a part of the Speaker Coach Team. She helps the presenters feel confident presenting their expertise and creating an engaging story. She works for the Detroit Tigers MLB team as a software engineer, and is a former professional softball player so being able to connect the two was a great opportunity.

Since playing softball Jen's tried a lot of sports, but recently she started to play underwater hockey and finds it really hard! In order to get enough energy to play hockey, her other hobby is making ice cream. Pistachio is by far the best flavour.

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Brenda is WIMDI's speaker coach. She helps our wonderful speakers show up as their shiny best selves on the WIMDI stage with memorable, engaging, and (most importantly!) informative presentations.

Brenda is a retired lawyer and has her own business as a Presentation Trainer and Coach at Memorable Presenter Consulting. She works with detail-oriented individuals (and the companies they work for) to help make their presentations memorable and engaging using the brain science of how people learn and remember.

Brenda was born in Vancouver (at the same hospital as her son) and has attended the Vancouver Folk Music Festival every year but one since 1983.

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Jennifer is the mastermind behind crafting WIMDI's PowerPoint speaker presentations. Her creativity and expertise empower presenters to weave captivating narratives, share knowledge, and engage their audience through visually enticing slides.

When she's not perfecting WIMDI slide decks, Jennifer is a freelance Full Stack Developer, and has a former career in operations and experiential marketing. She is passionate about partnering with companies in the fashion, travel, and health and wellness industries. Jennifer was born and raised in Toronto, and also spent a couple years living in Montreal prior to moving to Vancouver.

When she is not coding on her computer, Jennifer is running on the seawall, practising yoga, reading non-fiction novels or writing. Jennifer is also a “foster fail”, as she happily adopted a Tuxedo cat, named Binx, a couple years ago. Binx is usually found sleeping in his own office desk bed beside Jennifer while she works.

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Vaidehi spends her time finding awesome companies to support WIMDI and its cause, so that we all have a place to gather and some food and drinks for our longer events so that no one goes hungry and can comfortably pay attention to our amazing talks.

Vaidehi works in an asset management firm, where she analyzes crazy amounts of data and collaborates closely with a number of teams in the firm, assessing current business processes and identifying and implementing improvements to the technical and operational processes. She loves when she can look at the big picture and find solutions that positively impact the business or organization.

Vaidehi lived in Malawi, Africa for nearly 10 years before moving to Canada. She loves summers, being outdoors, and going for long, long walks (an average of 20 km per weekend!) to explore neighborhoods and discover new food and drinks. Vaidehi also enjoys playing tennis and dancing -- and even teaches Indian dancing!

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Angela is our resident photographer, capturing all those WIMDI special moments and giving you a visual insight into our wonderful events. All those gorgeous pics of smiling faces on WIMDI's website and social media? That's Angela's handiwork!

Angela is a photographer specializing in contemporary portraits and business & branding for small business owners. She helps her clients create professional images that send a powerful message and capture their essence. Whether it's one or two images for LinkedIn, or a more rounded profile of their businesses, Angela has the right mix of fun and serious to make anyone look great.

Angela is a certified crazy cat and crazy plant lady, with an addiction to trailing plants and rescue kitties. She is an proud kiwi import from provincial New Zealand, via Australia, and then Toronto. She is now loving the Vancouver lifestyle, living it up in yoga pants and a messy bun in Kitsilano.

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Helen creates WIMDI's graphic designs, using her aesthetic expertise to help us provide a gorgeous online experience . She makes eye-catching designs that help everyone easily access WIMDI’s amazing resources.

Helen is freelancing for a biomedical start-up company as a product designer and keeping up to date with the latest trends, methodologies, and tools by studying UX design at college.

Helen has a COVID puppy named Thunder. Although she never anticipated she would become a helicopter dog mom, Thunder eats organic grain-free kibbles and already has hundreds of non-toxic toys.

Follow Helen: Portfolio | LinkedIn

Rachael was in the driver’s seat for WIMDI marketing, helping orchestrate and showcase content from our amazing speakers, guests, members and volunteers. With some big ideas up her marketing sleeves, she implemented some next-level WIMDI awesomeness from beyond the sparkly offices of our sponsors!

Rachael thrives on putting her marketing expertise to use for brands that pull at her heartstrings and are out to do something amazing for the world (like helping bring career accelerating advice to women and advocating workplace equality!).

Three years ago Rachael moved from Britain to British Columbia, swapping castles in Colchester for vinyasas in Vancouver, and plans to stay for a while, thanks to how bloody beautiful BC is.

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Carter-James was WIMDI's video editor. He made sure that amazing content our speakers create was clear, beautiful, and available for all on YouTube.

Carter-James works in the film industry. His ultimate goal is always to better the lives of the people around him, especially when it involves diversity and love ("that sounds tacky? but I don't care!" - CJ). Sometimes that means editing a video for an awesome group like WIMDI. And sometimes it means working hard on a film set to help his colleagues. Sometimes it's even just surprising someone with Starbucks coffee!

Carter-James hails from the vast plains of Quebec and is happily and ass-kickingly transgender.

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Laura was WIMDI's Partnerships volunteer. She focused on connecting awesome women's organizations across North America with our shared goal of empowering and enabling women to reach their full potential.

Outside of WIMDI, Laura's a sales professional that is obsessed with making her Customers Heroes. She spends the better part of her days collaborating with executives and leaders to help them reach their strategic growth and automation potential.

Laura is passionate about telling stories that celebrate authenticity and showing women how to create a roadmap for career success. When she's not changing the world, she's hanging out with her long-'n-low corgi friend, Cece, making pottery and playing football in the park.

Follow Laura (and Cece!): LinkedIn | Instagram

Vivien kept WIMDI’s social media profiles active, posting all about our events and connecting with our community. Vivien came up with fresh content to promote our Café events and helped you keep track of which interactive webinar or speaker series was coming up next.

Anitha maintained the WIMDI website so that everyone could find and enjoy all of the great stuff WIMDI does. She loved getting to be a part of motivating all of our WIMDIs to have amazing careers.

Anitha is a full-stack web developer working at an Education-Tech startup in Vancouver focused on the psychology of education. She's working on both frontend and backend (but if she's honest, backend is her true passion).

Gardening and beaches make Anitha happy. She's a huge foodie and loves to experiment and try all kinds of yummy new treats. Anitha keeps her motivation up with her favourite quote (from The Secret): "Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase. Just the first step."

Follow Anitha: LinkedIn

Angela kept WIMDI’s designs looking fresh by helping brand our online and in-person presence!

Recently relocated to Vancouver, Angela is exploring new opportunities to transition from her typical administrative roles into the design world where she can leverage her creative eye and attention to detail. She also flexes these skills in running her own freelance photography business. Looking to stay on-top of design industry trends, Angela is a perpetual learner from her self taught Adobe Photoshop skills to completing formal UX and UI design training.

With a thirst for life, Angela is always up for adventure or pursuing one of her multitude of hobbies. In her free time, she can be found riding her motorcycle, going on road trips, hiking in nature, or working on her latest art project.

Follow Angela: Website | LinkedIn

Katherine was the content curator for WIMDI, helping to determine speaker series and webinar topics. She helped us find some unique and interesting topics to help women have kick-ass and enjoyable careers they are passionate about.

Katherine works in Rail & Transit Engineering, designing rail transit and its associated infrastructure to serve the public and help shape communities and cities. She works at Mott MacDonald, where she uses her passion for working on diverse teams to help to solve intricate challenges.

In her spare time, Katherine can be found being crafty (crochet, cross-stitch and watercolour painting) or playing board games with friends.

Follow Katherine: LinkedIn

Jennifer built partnerships to help WIMDI keep hosting its awesome events for the community, as well as looking at ways to expand the WIMDI network with other like-minded organizations.

At work, Jennifer spends her days communicating and engaging with program stakeholders on large, transformational programs to ensure they have the information they need, when they need it in order to be successful. After hours she can usually be found releasing her inner nerd by studying/learning something new. She recently completed her MBA in the Management of Technology and is now looking to level-up her thinking on her feet and public speaking game by taking improv classes.

Jennifer is an outdoor enthusiast! In the winter you can find her hitting the slopes, and in the summer she's either camping or doing some sort of water-based activity.

Follow Jennifer: LinkedIn

Josselyn kept WIMDI’s social media profiles active, posting all about our events and connecting with our community. During WIMDI’s events, you will most likely have found her live-tweeting and taking pictures.

Josselyn works full time as a Customer Experience Manager at a web hosting company in an all-male team – in fact, there are only 4 women on the entire Canadian team! She has always had a keen interest for technology and has always been everyone’s go-to person to fix everything, which has made her very proficient in Googling how-to’s.

Josselyn is originally from El Salvador and has called Canada her home for over 6 years now. She is also a plant mom and has lost track of how many she has – let’s say at least 30. Between tropicals and succulents, she can’t pick a favourite.

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Lauren put together the images, logos and icons for all marketing materials, bringing all the WIMDI colours to life.

She works full time as a Project Coordinator for one of Canada's top Managed Service Providers (MSP) where she's able to apply her skills in organizing, coordinating and managing resources. She aims to further her studies and work her way to getting certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

Originally from the Philippines, Lauren has moved to Vancouver with her hubby in 2017 and has since enjoyed her new home in North America. Her definition of a perfect night: Netflix and wine.

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Sarah built and maintained the website at WIMDI, and helped to put out any website fires as they happened.

Sarah has worked in the tech industry for the past few years, and currently works as a Developer at Shopify on an all-male team. Outside of work she builds curriculum and teaches web skills to all kinds of groups. She's passionate about breaking down barriers in tech.

While her day-job is stationary, Sarah's outside-of-work time is spent enjoying a somewhat newfound love of activity (and, let's face it, athleisure). You can typically catch her at yoga, on a long weekend walk, or training for a half marathon.

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