ME – WE – U
How women can plant SEEDs together to create values-based change in their communities, their organisations and the world. Lynne Franks tells her extraordinary story of starting her eponymous PR company in London at 21 from her kitchen table, building it up to being the biggest fashion agency in the world where she created London Fashion Week as well as launching awareness of many causes she cared about.
After selling her business and moving to California for five years, she wrote The SEED Handbook, the first book for women on sustainable business which became the basis of a series of SEED global learning and educational materials that has been delivered from African villages to women’s prisons; and from post war zones to the corporate boardroom.
Lynne explains her current work bringing pods of seven women and girls together to create community change as well as working with other like-minded women’s networks globally. Lynne will then be introducing some of her visionary changemaker friends to discuss how by collaboration and connection, we can build a new future through our networks, projects, skills and connections.
Her own Pod of Seven includes the inspirational Sister Jayanti, Brahma Kumaris global spiritual leader; former wild child Jo Wild, a former Stones wife and now off-grid grower and organic business woman; Miriam Kennett, a green networker of many years and co-founder of the influential Green Economic Forum; Orsola de Castro, eco-fashion designer and co-founder of the global Fashion Revolution which has changed the way fashion is shopped world wide; Sophia Swires, founder of Afghan charity Future Brilliance and the GEDI women’s impact investment fund and Dr Anino Emuwa, a high tech entrepreneur and founder of 100 Women of Davos. They too will be telling their stories and discussing how we can do more together than apart.
- Lynne Franks, business woman, author, activist and speaker, acknowledged as one of the UK’s leaders in women’s economic empowerment, is an acclaimed international spokesperson and advisor on the changes in today's and tomorrow's world - both for the individual as well as society at large.
- Orsola de Castro is spearheading a global movement calling for change in the fashion industry. After founding Fashion Revolution in 2013, she pioneered a global campaign in response to the Rana Plaza factory collapse and became an internationally recognised opinion leader in sustainable fashion. She is a leading speaker on fashion and sustainability. She has partnered with individuals like Lily Cole, Stella McCartney, Lauren Laverne and Emma Watson at Fashion Revolution.
- Dr. Anino Emuwa is the Managing Director of Avandis Consulting in France. She is the founder of 100 Women @Davos, a global community of impact-driven women leaders. A former corporate banker with Citibank, she sits on the board of several organizations including Nottingham Trent University.
Anino is a global expert on women’s leadership and judge for several impact initiatives including Cartier Women’s Initiative, Jack Ma Foundations, and Africa Business Heroes. She has been recognized as one of 100 Women of the Future: Metaverse and Web3 for her work to improve gender diversity in emerging technology.
- Miriam Kennet was one of the Founder Members of the Green Economics Institute Trust. She has led many educational courses and lectured around the world at many different Universities. She has led Youth in Action Courses for the British Council and the EU, Erasmus Student Courses for hundreds of students, qualification courses and many other educational practices including Adult Literacy at Black Friars Settlement in London, for which she trained at London University.
She teaches on the Summer School Programmes and also tutors our Post Graduate Research Program Students. She has published more than 100 articles, books academic proceedings and chapters and is a regular speaker all over Europe and advisor to governments and Ministers and appears on tv and radio, the BBC having made a special program about her life and work.
- Sister Jayanti is Additional Administrative Head of the Brahma Kumaris. She is also the Director of Brahma Kumaris activities in Europe and the Middle East. As a spiritual teacher for over 50 years, she has dedicated her life to self-transformation and service to humanity. Sister Jayanti is the Brahma Kumaris NGO representative at the UN in Geneva.
Since 1982, she has championed the co-operative role of spiritual organisations in creating a just and peaceful world. She has brought spiritual principles to the discussion tables of politicians, economists, business leaders, scientists and nearly every stakeholder of our times. Since the 1970s, she has been deeply involved with empowerment of women, running workshops and giving presentations in over 100 countries. She was an active participant in the International Women’s Year Conference in East Berlin in 1975, which heralded the start of the United Nations Decade for Women.
- Sophia Swire began her career at Kleinwort Benson Securities, part of London’s largest Investment Bank, but after the market crash of 1987, she started down a very different path, one that would have a direct, meaningful and immediate impact on people's lives. Whilst trekking in Chitral, a remote, snow-bound valley in Pakistan’s Hindu Kush she was approached by the local Deputy Commissioner who asked her to help him up an English Medium school, and returned to spend a year teaching there.
She went on to co‐found Learning for Life, a UK-based charity that supported the establishment of over 250 village schools for girls in rural Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. For this, she was awarded the 2010 Pakistan Achievement Award. In the 1990s, she launched and managed an innovative, social impact cashmere brand, Sophia Swire London, that is widely credited with starting the global fashion trend for pashmina shawls.
In 2008, she started Afghanistan’s first Jewellery and Gem-cutting school for the charity, Turquoise Mountain, and has since worked with various Afghanistan-based government and non-government organisations to reform the gemstone mining sector and put more value into the hands of Afghan miners and artisans. In 2012, she founded the non-profit Future Brilliance to foster stability and prosperity through enterprise and workforce development in post conflict countries. Its first project helped Afghan women artisans gain access to the gemstone and jewellery value chain. In 2021, Sophia launched GEDI, her global women’s investment fund, at COP26, where she spoke about women’s led businesses working for climate change.
- Jo Wood saw her mother working as an Avon lady, which inspired her interest in fashion and beauty. At 16 she left school to become a model, achieving almost immediate success after being crowned the The Sun’s Face of ’72. She worked until she met Ronnie and after a few years together became his PA, as well as styling him for stage and photo shoots. Her love of the organic lifestyle came from a health scare in 1989, which changed the way she wanted to live. Starting with the food she ate – she learnt everything she could about organic farming – her passion for all things organic quickly turned to products she used on her skin.
Struggling to find organic and natural beauty products that not only looked great, but that actually performed on the skin, Jo took matters into her own hands and launched Jo Wood Organics at Harvey Nichols in 2006, which then went on to launch in USA and Canada.
Jo was on a one-woman mission to show the beauty industry that organic products could be luxurious, sophisticated, and decadent and that there were other consumers like her who wanted more of a choice. Having taken a break from business in 2009 for personal reasons, she’s now back to relaunch Jo Wood Organics with two sensual and exotic fragrances, Amka and Usiku, across Eau de Toilette, Body Oil and Candle products.
Co-convener:
- Jim Garrison, President, Ubiquity University
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