Global Mentoring Walk 2015

Global Mentoring Walk 2015

This weekend couldn’t have been better for the women of Delhi as they spent the Saturday morning for their own self keeping aside the household works and important people for couple of hours. How often do we meet people who would love to talk about their life and would have their ears for your story? Biz Divas is a non-profit organisation that works towards giving a platform for women with skills and pave out ways for them to reach to influential positions eradicating the challenges they face. On the occasion of women’s day, Biz Divas organised a global mentoring walk wherein they invited few women to be mentors and few to be the mentees. They then formed a pair or group, where one would be the mentee and other would be the mentor, based on the kind of work they do.

A refreshing walk by women for women organized by Biz Diva

These groups/pair then go on a long walk wherein they talk not only about the challenges they face but also about various doubts and factors of life making the mentee more confident and strong. Started in July, 2011 Biz Divas were a bunch of entrepreneurs who started this venture and realised that a lot of women would come and approach them to know how to start a venture and discuss about their challenges to manage career and family or registration of office etc. They would get a lot of calls and appointment requests, so they thought that they would dedicate a day once in a month to help each other. It was really a small effort taken by them but never did they know that so many people would turn up.

“The response has been amazing and we are the only platform, which invites women from all walks of life and help each other and provide contacts and space for growth. Here the myth that a woman doesn’t help the other woman has been broken and we realised that even we should have a club for ourselves where we cater to our needs and focus on our stress rather than doing it for others which we always do.” Says Sarika Bhattacharya, Co-founder, Biz Divas.

A good number of turn up at Global Mentoring Walk

Biz Divas focuses on four platforms- mentoring- as a tool of promoting women leadership in big way, creating network for them, diversity and inclusive consulting program for organisation to make them a better working place for women and even from different countries, fourthly they do a research where they came up with a women on board report where the new law said that every listed company should have a women entrepreneur on board. “We went out to many cities and many companies; spoke to many woman and companies to work on how to get women on front, not only in corporate sector but in other walks of life too. However, it was really shocking to not find a single woman holding the position of a CEO in the company and even if they do the number is very handful” articulates Sarika Bhattacharya.

Knowing the challenges faced by both the companies and the women, the organisation started to work towards making a smooth way to fight these challenges. Also, they wanted to give a visibility to these women and make them converse with the people on higher level to get a good guidance and exposure. “Unfortunately, in India women are not seen talking about the work they have done so far. So, platforms like us are a voice for such women and a step in making them leaders” expresses Ranjana Diapa, Biz Divas.

Kameshwari became the mentee for Patralekha Chatterjee, Veteran Journalist and Columnist.

Further Ranjana also spoke about the process of getting selected for the mentoring walk and how the pairing of mentor and mentee is decided, “When we ask for application we ask them to give a bio-data and ask them to share some challenges they face in their working life and based on this info we find the best match for them to be their mentor. We also have a structured mentoring program of six months where even men become the part of the mentor-mentee program, this program receives a lot of applications and we also have to reject some and every year the applications increases. We have interviews too for the chosen applicants wherein we get to know why they want to be a part of this program, what it is for them because we want the applicants to be serious about this program as a lot goes into it. Also, these mentees are also featured in our magazines, blogs etc.”

The global mentoring walk happens every year around women’s day and this time it happened simultaneously at three other places other than Delhi- Bangalore, Mumbai and Dhaka. Biz Diva is a part of a larger movement organised by Vital Voice which is an NGO run by Hillary Clinton in US, which would soon organise a global mentoring walk in more than 67 ciites and Biz Diva is doing their part organising it in 4 cities.