Female professional participants are encouraged to “be fearlessly authentic, bravely you” at this year’s 21st Annual Women’s Leadership Summit from the Middlesex County Regional Chamber of Commerce, held on Thursday, October 20, from 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
MCRCC’s event takes place in-person at the DoubleTree by Hilton Somerset Hotel and Conference Center. Cost: $175; $150 members; $125 students. Register online via EventBrite.
Arranged by the Chamber’s Women in Business Committee, the summit is a day of networking, speakers, panel discussions, brunch, and a wellness expo. This is in acknowledgement that “success is different for every person,” as the website states, noting that New Jersey’s diversity was a reason for choosing a variety of topics in a “one-stop-shop” to satisfy individuals on a “professional, personal, and wellness level.”
After registration, Kathleen Cashman-Walter, the president of Hainesport-based coaching and leadership development business Cashman Consulting, will present the morning workshop “Positive Intelligence.”
The professor of communication and leadership at Rutgers University was a major force in establishing a “leadership brand” in the institution’s master of business and science degree — under the professional science master’s program — about 10 years ago. Cashman-Walter’s involvement in combining these subjects, as the Rutgers website explains, means that the university is the only in the state to offer such a program.
Cashman-Walter has a dual bachelor of science degree in marketing and management from Seton Hall University, as well as a master of business administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University.
The panel discussion kicks off at 10:30 a.m., running for approximately one hour. One of the women featured is Bloomberg journalist and senior editor Stacie Sherman, who, over almost three decades, has been bureau chief of both Trenton and Princeton. Prior to her present position, she was the deputy managing editor for Bloomberg’s national news coverage.
Sherman received her bachelor’s in journalism from Trenton State College, now known as The College of New Jersey, then her master of science in business journalism from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Back in March, business media company ROI-NJ named Sherman a 2022 Influencer in its “Women in Business” section. She is also a board member and trustee of Princeton’s Eden Autism, a nonprofit that offers school programs, vocational training, residential services, and more to support autistic individuals.
After lunch, the philanthropic speaker, Michelle Wilson, will share her thoughts. Wilson is the executive director of Elijah’s Promise, a New Brunswick nonprofit organization working to “harness the power of food to break the cycle of poverty, alleviate hunger, and change lives,” according to the group’s website; this is done through a community kitchen, state-certified job training program and culinary school, community garden, health services, and more.
Wilson, a graduate of Douglass College with a master’s degree from the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, first became involved with Elijah’s Promise back “in 1977, when she was the coordinator of the Youth Farmstand Project, an initiative through the Rutgers Urban Ecology Program in the Rutgers Department of Nutritional Sciences,” per her MCRCC bio. She joined officially in 2006, then was appointed to her current position in January, 2018.
Wilson’s remarks are followed by keynote speaker Jennifer Solewski, the vice president of business & technical development for Bayshore Recycling. From its Woodbridge Township headquarters, the organization’s website states that the company oversees multiple recycling operations and a “58-acre eco-complex and energy campus.”
Solewski, a resident of Watchung, has a degree in environmental engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, which she utilized at the firm CME Associates before coming to Bayshore Recycling as a compliance manager.
Currently, with this “environmental and economic” perspective in mind, Solewski has been monitoring “facility-wide environmental compliance and technical sales” for more than a decade. At the conclusion of Solewski’s time, the Women’s Leadership Summit will end with closing comments.
For more information and a full list of speakers, see MCRCC’s website at mcrcc.org.
