Lakefield College’s Female Leadership Summit

Peter O’Grady, Director of Student Leadership and teacher of Outdoor Education at Canadian school, Lakefield College School, shares his school’s approach to organising a female leadership summit to inspire female students to challenge themselves in their life and career choices after school.

Author and position: Peter O’Grady, Director of Leadership 

School: Lakefield College is nestled alongside a lake in Ontario in an area described as ‘cottage country’ with the highlands to the north and grasslands to the south. It’s a small school serving 363 pupils from grades 9-12, 2/3 of which board at the co-educational school. 

Introduction  

Lakefield’s first girls’ leadership summit arose from a desire to address the disconnect between girls’ success as leaders at school with the low levels of female leaders in life beyond school. And with minds focused on our nation’s 150th anniversary, it seemed an opportune time to reflect on progress on gender equality and look at the ambitions for our society in the future. 

The event format itself was inspired by a national event held by Dr Betsey McGregor, of McGregor Leadership, a prominent campaigner on issues of gender and leadership. The school had established links with this influential figure years ago, and saw how her own ‘Trailblazer’ event (attended by some of our students) had used the testimony of up-and-coming and influential women to inspire female students. By sharing the stories of women at the top, and on their way up, the organisers were able to show young women the stepping stones they might need to realise their own career and life ambitions. 

We considered how such an event could be modified for our own school environment and provide a conduit for students to make connections with their experiences of leadership, and go deeper into the topic of gender equality outside of the classroom. 

Planning  

Our contact with Dr Betsy Mcgregor was vital in helping us shape the event and consider the female advocates who could be involved. With the advice and leadership of Dr McGregor, a list of local female campaigners and business leaders was compiled and defined into two categories: 

• Pathfinders – women in the early stages of their education or profession making significant strides in their line of work; 
• Trailblazers – women who have advanced to a level of seniority and influence in their careers. 

Examples of the speakers involved included community activists, business owners, health promoters and feminist writers. In defining our list, it was important to us that we reached out to a broad representation of female figures across the community, including indigenous communities. Speakers were not paid to participate but were offered reimbursement for travel costs. 

Our invitations for involvement also extended to government figures, imbuing the event with a sense of gravitas and showing the political support structure that is building around this issue.  

The Lieutenant Governor of Ontario kindly agreed to participate through a video call allowing the students the opportunity to share their learnings and thoughts on the issue directly with her. We also shared a video message from the Federal Minister of the Status of Women. 

We tried wherever possible to get the trailblazers and pathfinders to meet in advance of the conference, to share ideas on topics and themes that could be discussed at the event. This was possible on a few occasions and helped create a happy familiarity and connection during the event itself. 

We created a student planning committee and invited students to volunteer to help us create the platform for the day and manage all the logistics around the event itself – student involvement, catering, room and technical set-up and consider how we could incorporate our broader focus on the UN sustainable development goals in our programme’s themes. 

We invited all independent and public schools within a 90-minute drive of our school’s campus to attend, working on the basis that such a distance was the maximum amount that we could expect a school to travel. By inviting our ‘neighbours’, the event had a sense of ‘locality’, community and purpose, and rooted the debate in a real context. 

Due to capacity in the school, we were unable to accommodate all of our own LCS female students so in the interests of fairness, we allocated places to grade representatives, organizers, and any students performing at the event itself. 

Activity 

The event took place over a single day in November and was held in our gymnasium to accommodate numbers. 

It began with a rousing opening ceremony led by a drummer from one of our First Nation communities, leading a circle song and exercise, emphasising unity and celebrating the feeling of all women being together.  

We were very intentional about combining live music and dance within the interspersed breaks throughout the morning. Live entertainment included the LCS Jazz band, String Quartet, and the LCS Dance Team. The dance number was performed by all girls and inspired by recent events that were calling out for women to stand up together. 

After the welcomes, we then proceeded with the speaker segments. Each speaker was given just six minutes to address the conference and used the following three pointers as a guide for their address: 

• Rearview mirror – their perspective on how their past activity/beliefs impacted their progress 
• Toolbox – the skills or attributes they needed to get ahead 
• Binoculars – their ambitions and goals for the future 

The above speaker model had been used successfully in the national trailblazer launch and ensured we were able to pack a lot of advice from a range of speakers into a single day’s event. The relatively short time provided for speeches also helped crystallise the speakers’ thoughts and learnings into manageable takeaways for the students. 

We interspersed the day with exercises and brainstorming sessions which explored the topic of female leadership in different ways. One exercise invited the students to think about how they could encourage a crow to drink water. This encouraged the students to think more broadly about the question of action – how you encourage action, through activities large and small, and how you take the most important step of all and really clarify what the issue is that you and possibly a team are going to take action upon. Other exercises were more direct; simply asking the question of ‘how can women become more empowered?’ and inviting the students to brainstorm possible solutions. 

Challenges 

• Positioning the conference – One of the challenges we faced was how to position the conference in a way that involved and engaged the male students, recognising their role as partners in this mission. We considered inviting male students from all the invited schools into the conference in the afternoon but it did not feel like the right approach to us. It felt a little contrived and we were concerned it would take away the impact of the morning’s events. We are seriously considering how we might improve on the format in the coming year to involve both genders. 
• Engagement and reach – It was important to us that we reached out to public schools in our area but we recognised there are time and financial factors that may have prohibited their involvement. To address these potential barriers, we kept the schedule tightly packed to within a school day and also reimbursed the cost of travel. 

Impact 

The event itself was very warmly received by all the participating students and speakers and we were pleased that the event was also positively profiled by our local media. Immediate feedback from attending students and staff was positive and inspiring. 

To help students self-reflect and establish connections with other students and advocates, we included a personal action plan at the back of their programme and encouraged them to share contact details with their peers or lend their support and advocacy through social media. 

We decided to hold off on any evaluation until the start of the new year to give space for the learning to take hold. We will be reaching out to all our participating schools for their feedback on the impact the event may have had on their students, what they would like us to do in the future, and how we can widen the impact of the event by involving the broader community. 

The future 

In the future we would like to increase representation in our area, encouraging even more schools to attend. We are also keen to create a way that schools can report back on how the event has influenced and inspired their students, or ignited initiatives in their schools. We will be exploring different formats and looking at ways to encourage the students to be even more involved in the event, perhaps as presenters and through running workshops. 

 Advice 

• Start early – Include the students early on to enrich the learning experience for them.
• Have internal and external allies – Get an allay outside of your school community – someone who is well-connected and experienced in the topic or issue. Get an allay within your school! It does not have to be a woman and in fact, it’s good for girls to see a male representative engaging in the topic.
• Have a clear purpose – Be clear on the objective of the event – to help the students get in the right mindset to ensure they are aware of the reason and purpose of exercises throughout the day.
• It goes without saying that this event was a team effort. We had an incredible committee comprised of six staff. Thank you to Theresa Butler-Porter, Lorraine Brown, Libby Dalrymple, Diane Rogers, Vicky Boomgaardt, and Vera Wilcox for the time and energy they invested to ensure we were doing everything possible to provide an amazing experience. This committee also had four students and we could not have hosted this event without Betsy Macdonnell, Maddy Sheward, Alice Prindiville- Porto, and Katherine Petrasek- their commitment and ongoing contributions to the event were incredible. Lastly, our thanks and gratitude for the tireless energy, focus, direction, and leadership from Dr. Betsy McGregor cannot go unrecognized. Dr. McGregor’s passion and commitment were the pull from in front, the push from behind, and the glue that kept us together. We are so appreciative for her involvement and are already working together again preparing for next fall.