INSPIRING WOMEN
We talk to Selene Vakharia about empowering women
October is Women’s History Month, so we’re featuring an inspiring Canadian woman to mark the occasion. We spoke with Canadian business and marketing strategist and coach Selene Vakharia, who is the owner and co-founder of Whitehorse-based SMRT POP UPS, about her work, the importance of community-building and empowering women in leadership roles.
CANADIAN LIVING (CL): Tell us a little bit about your companies SMRT POP UPS and SMRT Women.
SELENE VAKHARIA (SV): SMRT POP UPS is a marketing and events company that works with NGOS, governments and businesses. It’s based on fostering community and the value of community well-being. Whether I’m working with arts organizations, women’s shelters or governments, my clients all want to have a positive impact in their communities, and I help them achieve that through marketing, events and a lot of audience-building. SMRT Women really grew out of SMRT POP UPS about three years ago. My business partner at the time, Sofia Fortin, and I noticed there were so many incredible women in the Yukon who had businesses or wanted to start businesses. They were coming to us at SMRT POP UPS for support and guidance, which led us to develop coaching programs that were a better fit for their needs. It really made us see the demand for creating a space in which these women could come together to help each other reach their business goals. Even though both my companies are relatively new—five- and three-years-old respectively—they've morphed and evolved to meet important community needs.
CL: What was it that inspired you to start these organizations?
SV: SMRT POP UPS didn’t even start out as a business, it began with a series of small educational events designed to spark conversation, where people could have fun, network and leave having learned something. For one event, we organized an exciting speed dating-style event in which community members were able to have one-on-one conversations with local candidates running in the 2015 municipal and federal elections. For another event, we partnered with a local museum for “A Night at the Museum: Lost Heritage Minutes,” where storytellers shared
their favourite forgotten moments in Yukon history. It was the spirit and energy of events like these that ended up being a core value of what SMRT POP UPS, and then SMRT Women, are all about.
CL: In your experience, how important is community-building for women to reach their goals?
SV: I’ve always felt that it’s very important. I went to an all-girls high school, so women coming together to do amazing things, accomplish goals and support one another is something I grew up with, and it continues to be very meaningful to me. From the very beginning, SMRT Women has been a community where women can share their experiences and knowledge to help each other out. People I’ve worked with have told me how they were inspired, felt less stuck, and developed their businesses in ways and directions they never thought possible.
CL: Last November, you helped organ-ize Yukon’s first-ever women’s leader-ship summit, She/ze Leads the World: A Summit for Women Leaders in the North. What did you learn through that experience?
SV: We wanted to make sure it wasn’t a typical conference or summit, where you go and hear people speak (which, of course, does have a lot of value in itself). Instead, what we wanted was for participants to actually feel that by the end of the two days, they had gone from point A to point B. We worked hard to build a storyline through the programming with speakers from all over Canada and across the North. It was so great to discover the diversity of women’s projects and goals and learn what leadership means to women in the North. Everyone seemed to feel very engaged and at the end of the conference many people were able to get closer to achieving their goals.
CL: As the basis of the summit you helped to organize, what do you see as the importance of women taking on more leadership roles?
SV: There are two really big things that I always come back to: One, in general, when it comes to innovation or community well-being, it is overwhelmingly shown that diversity of voices in the room is what helps us to achieve our goals as a city, a territory, a country, a world. Women are still lacking representation in leadership roles. So what’s really important and a big driving force behind both the summit and SMRT Women is bringing women together to learn from one another and build networks that help support and elevate everyone. And two, when it comes to the economic development of a place or a community, if 50 percent of the population feels as though they can’t always participate, then that has a huge impact on the health of the community as a whole. So anything that supports women being able to participate when they want to, and in the way that they want to, is beneficial for everyone in the room, not just that particular segment of the population.
CL: What’s one specific challenge that women are facing in becoming leaders in Canada—and how do you think this challenge is experienced differently in Yukon or other parts of Northern Canada?
SV: One of the things that comes up frequently is capacity, which is a word we use a lot in the North—honestly it comes up in almost every conversation. Women are regularly seen as having to contribute more just to be regarded as on the same level as men. What that means is that we have to take on a lot more work, more projects, and yet still have pressures like childcare and other responsibilites that tend to fall on women. I think that’s something that happens in the North but also across Canada: there are a lot of additional factors and stressors that we feel the need to live up to just to be getting ahead at all. Vicki Saunders—a keynote speaker at the women in leadership summit—talks about a business pitch scenario and how women are required to provide so much more evidence and to do so much more in order to build the confidence of the people in the room, to be seen as valuable and as someone whose ideas are valuable. This is challenging on a daily basis while you're also facing all the other things that you want to do.
CL: What have you learned as a result of building this community of women entrepreneurs?
SV: There are many people on the peer level who I’ve learned from and who have provided me with support. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned and that I find the most valuable is how to manage challenges. When you’re running your own business, you’re often alone and it’s really important to connect with others who have been through what you’re going through to bounce ideas off, share with and gain more perspective.
CL: What’s the most important thing that we, as Canadians and as women, can do to empower women in our communities?
SV: The thing that I’ve been thinking about lately, and part of it is because of the pandemic, is about asking the right questions. As I do more research into women entrepreneurship and leadership, what I see is that we often aren’t asking the question how to get people what they need. More work has been done recently—there’s a lot of great advocacy to support women in business—and those questions are starting to be asked. But we need to keep asking those questions as we move forward, and we need to continue evaluating to make sure we’re actually supporting women in a way that’s meaningful to them, which will then lead to meaningful results for our communities as a whole.