2023 Offsite Letter

What a year!  I’ll be the first to admit that the year got off to a rocky start. You’d think I’d anticipate the challenges of a change in leadership at this stage in my career!  Our beloved Candice found her passion working with EWF International, a company with a mission similar to ours.  As an organization, we hadn’t scaled our processes well enough to be able to handle the transition seamlessly.  What happened?

  • We didn’t remind you enough times about renewing your membership. Some people who wanted to continue participating in HiPower missed a fun year.

  • We didn’t do a good job of connecting renewing payments to Mobilize.  It took us a while to get everyone back on our discussion group.

  • Mobilize broke at the start of the year!  To be fair, that wasn’t our fault!!  But it got fixed and everyone is back up on it again.

  • We couldn’t get the new UPWARD team up to speed fast enough on our communication needs.

For all of this, I want to apologize.  And let you know that a few HiPower leaders have invested a huge amount of their time during the first half of this year helping us put in scalable operations - and Anjana Utarid and Sarah Link from UPWARD have spent countless days getting up to speed on how we run HiPower.  I hope you’ve all seen a difference in the second half of this year.  

Two things that many of you don’t know.

First, I am sometimes asked, “What is UPWARD and how does it connect to HiPower”?  Here’s the short story.  UPWARD acquired the HiPower program a few years ago.  So HiPower is now one of the programs that UPWARD manages, along with many other programs focused on elevating professional women, and communities that they manage around the United States and internationally.  We are lucky to have the support of UPWARD, as well as the flexibility to continue running HiPower the same way it has always been run - with our members and their success as our primary priority.

Second, what many of our newer members don’t know is that, outside of assistance we get from Anjana and Sarah, HiPower is an entirely volunteer run program.  Anjana and Sarah manage HiPower in addition to all their other UPWARD responsibilities.  The rest of us spend time organizing programming and events because we love our community and want to give to it as much as we get back from it.  We aren’t a VC-backed women’s club (think Wing, Chief, Ellevate, etc…).  We are one of the other thousand organizations that rely mostly on our volunteers to keep our community running.  And our fees are reflective of that (just check out Chief’s annual membership fee).  We don’t strive to make money.  Our fees cover our costs.  

I wanted to take up some of this space to give you this background because it’s important for all of our members to know who we are and how we operate.  If you have an idea for how we can get better, we welcome your help in moving that idea to production and making it a reality.  I like to say, “We are member operated. Not coin operated.”

Welcome Ring 10!

I have so enjoyed meeting our Ring 10 members and hope our alumni attending the Offsite take the opportunity to get to know them over the 2 days we have together.

The Offsite is Ring 10’s official graduation weekend!  More than that though, we hope you see the magic in the community we have built as you meet our alumni executives and that you decide to stay on and become a HiPower executive member.  We will walk through membership fees and benefits on Sunday morning.  If you can’t stick around, please make sure you get the information from one of your Ring members.  You can also see our alumni membership benefits on this page of our website.

2023 Activities

In 2023, we ran a hybrid Spring Refresh in March, a Bay Area summer social in June, two “This is Me” virtual discussions, and three Expert Series presentations (ChatGPT, Crisis Management, and Culture First Leadership).

In addition to these more official HiPower programs, 

  • HiPower Ring 7 Connie Kwan organized regular HiPower hikes in the California Bay Area

  • HiPower Ring 6 Wendy Lim organized summer BYOFs (Bring Your Own Friend) happy hours

  • HiPower Austin continued to meet through the year, bringing in speakers for professional development sessions as well as meeting for dinners and lunches (and I’m sure drinks!). Tamsen Barrett, Leigh Christie, Lourdes Norton and Susan Wittliff keep things going, over in the “Keeping it Weird” city.  Joyce Durst led an expert series!

  • HiPower Ring 3 Annie Rogaski continued driving the Racial Justice meet ups throughout the year.

  • HiPower Ring 8 Preethy Padmanabhan ran some amazing meditation sessions for us.

  • and I’m sure I’ve missed many more impromptu HiPower activities from this list.

Discussion Board

We got off to a slow start but our HiPower community is resilient and strong!  Hopefully, everyone caught all the activity happening on our discussion board this year, including:

  • sharing fun events for us to attend, including Shannon Nash’s many invitations (2023 Afropolitan Ball! and 2023 Women CFO of the Year Award Gala!)

  • posting of a few board, advisory and employment opportunities

  • business advice

  • recommendations

Some of you aren’t yet used to taking advantage of our Discussion Board.  Here’s the general rule that HiPower long timers follow. 

  • Ask for yourself.  We are here to support our HiPower community, but we don’t have the bandwidth to support your friends and organizations you find compelling.

  • If you do ask for yourself, we will do everything we can to answer.  We not only get value from this community.  We are committed to giving value also.

What We Stand For

At our Annual Spring Refresh, we had a great conversation about why we continue to stay with, and invest in, HiPower and what we need to make it even better.  That discussion turned into a smaller group giving their time to answer these questions.

After some brainstorming and iterations in April, a small HiPower leadership team agreed on a rewrite of our mission statement.  This is our mission statement now, and it is on our website.

HiPower is a network of accomplished leaders committed to elevating and amplifying one another on our journey from success to significance. Through our programs, we help women and non-binary professionals determine what they want to be known for, and then leverage the network to expand our influence.  When you are part of the HiPower community, you find your personal board of directors.

Special shout out and thanks to the following HiPowerites for working together, and with me, to rewrite our mission statement, and also brainstorm our programming.

Shani Higgins Connie Kwan

Eleanor Lacey Hayley Nelson

Elizabeth Dean Lena Cheng

Grace Wu Wendy Lim

Speaking of… we then spent a bit of time reviewing the Alumni activities calendar to make sure we were providing the programming our membership wants.  Based upon discussions with this team and others, we now have a 2024 Alumni Calendar chock-full of opportunities to learn, connect, commune, give, and get!  (Now all we have to do is to move this calendar into events in Mobilize so that everything appears on your personal calendars - as long as you are subscribed!)



2024 Offsite

Y’all know that our offsite has become THE event of the year.  Next year, we are taking THE event on the road!  Our 2024 Offsite will be held November 1- 3 at the HIlton Lake Las Vegas!  YES.  That’s in Las Vegas!

Why Las Vegas?  Because we are trying to accommodate our non-California members by finding a more neutral location. And because hotels in Las Vegas are cheaper than hotels in California! And because Las Vegas is a location that most people can fly to without having to stop over somewhere. And because the Hilton Lake Las Vegas isn’t on the Las Vegas strip - so we’ll be away from the more inappropriate elements of the city!

Special Shout Outs

Before I end this End-of-the-Year letter, I want to take a moment to thank a few people who have been there for me this year.

Anjana and Sarah Link (UPWARD) - for nominating me for the UPWARD volunteer of the year award! And for helping right the HiPower ship this year!

Jessica Shor (Ring 3) - form helping me lead HiPower and ensuring our new Rings get the best experience we can give them

Heather Jerrehian (Ring 7) and Maria Fernandez Guajarda (Ring 4) - agreeing to take on a crazy project and write a book together

Michelle Newcome (Ring 9) - agreeing to work with some crazy HiPowerites and publish the book we want to write

Jan Kang (Ring 1) - getting me an interview with X, and generally being there with me every step of the way!

Delida Costin, Sharon Segev, Kim Le and Stewart McDowell (Ring 1) - for sticking with me for over a decade now and being the best Ring, and friends, EVER!

Preethy Padmanabhan (Ring 8) - for nominating me for a Women of Impact award, which I won!!

Jory Des Jardin (Ring 3) - for trusting me to help out with her new startup!

Einat Meisel (Ring 5) - getting me an interview with a client, being my cheerleader throughout the interview process, and recommending me for a job that I eventually decided to take!

Everyone - who helped us by voting up our SXSW proposal (we don’t hear back until November)

And so many other amazing HiPowerites that have given their time this year to keep our community buzzing and growing – too many names to name! I’m grateful for you all!

One more thing.  We are largely a volunteer run organization.  But our costs exceed the total of the membership fees we bring in.  That’s why we truly appreciate our sponsors.  Our 2023 sponsors:

2024 is going to be a good year - I can feel it.  We are getting bigger, but more importantly, we are building a community together - and that’s the only way to build something great.  Thank you for continuing this journey.

Mona Sabet