We have brought together an amazing group of presenters across our four conference themes. If you'd like to know more about them you can check out their profiles below. They are listed in order of appearance in the program.
Toolbox Talks Session 1
Concurrent Sessions - Day One - 11.15am -12.15pm
Paula Liddle, William Buck
Financial security for women |
How financially secure are you as a partner of a farmer should your relationship breakdown, or your partner was to pass away?
William Buck Business Advisory Director Paula Liddle will draw on her wealth of experience assisting farming families to provide the key factors in how to identify what assets you and your partner own and control and therefore how financially secure you are. This session will include discussion on the following areas:
Ensure your and your partners’ assets are left to the right people including superannuation nominations and control of trusts |
Kathleen Tierney
Learn How to Use Benchmarking to Define, Navigate, Validate and Achieve Confidence and Success |
Using pragmatic tips and tools to help guide you through each stage of your “career” – for whatever age, or stage you are at – and, whether you have a paid job, career or not.
What do you want to be when you grow up? · How to Figure out your Strengths, Interests and Goals · Don’t forget your Values · Being comparative, not competitive · Designing your career with decision-making tools What’s your price? Don’t underestimate your Value! · Know what you deserve- understand why competencies matter · Your Time and Skills have a Price · How to do your own Salary Review (even if you’re not getting paid!) · Tips for Achieving Parity Getting Validation - How are you tracking? · How to feel smarter - do you really need a piece of paper? · Using Gap Analysis for validation · Great Mentors give real feedback Navigating Life Challenges · How benchmarking data and norms can improve your decisions and impact · Is your Style Constructive? · Whose opinion matters most? · Head v Heart Decision making · Defining Values and Happiness Success · Build your success/support network · Lost or wandering – how benchmarking tools can help you re-energise your self-worth. · You’ve got the knowledge, skills, experience and choice to use it, lose it, or ditch it. · Don’t forget to celebrate your success |
Naomi Read, NBN Co
Digital Connectivity, Capability and Australian Agriculture |
Connectivity provides a valuable opportunity to transform Agricultural businesses. Through collaboration, nbn is committed to uplifting digital literacy, education and awareness to help increase the adoption of digital agriculture in Australia.
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Skye Raward & Phillipa Lawson
Inspiring Women in Agriculture to pursue an entrepreneurial journey: From dreaming to doing |
This interactive workshop will explore the entrepreneurial journey through the narrative of a real case study. The workshop will cover:
The workshop will follow Pip’s journey and provide the audience with the opportunity to work out what the next step is through a very practical and interactive process. |
Toolbox Talks Session 2
Concurrent Sessions - Day One - 1.15pm -2.15pm
Kate Gunn
How to make good decisions for you, your family and your farming business |
Using relatable examples, we will talk through a series of practical decision-making steps and why they can be helpful when making big decisions in tough times. Participants will be encouraged to identify their own personal values and business values within the session. They will also be asked to consider how they could implement these steps to make decision-making easier and optimize the wellbeing of themselves, their families and their businesses in the future. The strategies that will be outlined will be informed primarily by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which is an evidence-based approach that Kate has been adapting to meet the needs of farmers for many years. Handouts will be provided to facilitate in-session tasks and summarize key take away messages.
Why should I attend this workshop?
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Danielle England
The power of people in your business: a workshop to create your HR toolbox |
In this an interactive workshop conference participants will create a workforce plan for their business (farm or other). This will let participants review their current workforce structures, skills, management, and culture. Through this, participants will create a reporting structure and job descriptions for their current staff and family members; and communication and annual training plans for their business. It will give participants a chance to match current skills with business requirements, and to identify gaps within their workforce plan. It will give them tips and tricks to create a positive workplace culture and identify ways to recognise the important role that staff play in their business. Participants will receive a handbook for future reference, and work with Danielle in the session to draft a workforce plan. The workshop will be delivered in Danielle’s interactive style, drawing on the experiences of other businesses owners in the workshop.
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Sharon Honner & Megan Ross
Are you flexing your curiosity muscle? |
As women in Agriculture we often feel stuck and not sure how we can add value to our families or business. "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day" Albert Einstein Why is it so important? 1. It's good for your health. One of the first signs of neurological illness and declining health is a decline in curiosity. 2. It makes you smarter. Curious people ask questions and search for answers, making their minds active instead of passive. Your mind is like a muscle. Continuing to exercise it through curiosity makes your mind stronger. 3. It makes your mind observant of new ideas. When you're curious about something, your mind expects and anticipates new ideas. Without curiosity, ideas might pass you by. 4. It opens up new worlds and possibilities. By being curious, you will see possibilities. A curious mind looks beneath the surface and discovers these new possibilities. 5. It brings excitement into your life. There are always new things to attract a curious person's attention. Instead of being bored, curious people have an adventurous life. 6. Curiosity is an antidote to anxiety. Curious people act to explore what intrigues them, reducing feelings of anxiety and discomfort. Curious people test ideas out. Enhancing curiosity helps us to tackle change and challenging life events. Curiosity is hard-wired in our brain. Although we differ in how we process information and view change and uncertainty, we each have a curiosity level. The good news is that curiosity can be grown.
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Kelly Barnes
Mustering resilience - a dogs tail |
Everyone loves a good story and we have grown up with fairy tales and fiction but what we often overlook is the impact of our own stories and the change we can create by sharing. A chance to reflect and look back on my journey during participation in a digital storytelling workshop run by Alison Kennedy and the National Centre for Farmer Health. Compiling my story allowed me to grieve the losses that come with chronic pain and fatigue and use this experience to move forward and find a new sense of self-worth and inspire others. It sparked an idea and gave me the confidence to apply for and go on to win the Victorian AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award in 2020 for my pilot working dog training program aimed at building low stress stock handling and dog training skills, reducing social isolation and creating networks of likeminded people. The program was based around my own experiences with my working dogs and how they provided me with so much more than just a tool for moving stock.
My presentation is an overview of my own personal journey so far, and the opportunities that have arisen from really focusing on my personal experiences and using these as an opportunity. It highlights the positive outcomes that have come from participating in the workshop and the flow on effects from that moment of vulnerability. The workshop includes generous space for questions and interaction to allow participants to discuss and work through the barriers of telling their stories, and find ways in which you can use your stories, leaving the presentation feeling empowered to tell your own stories and with a greater understanding of the power of sharing. |
Toolbox Talks Session 3
Concurrent Sessions - Day One - 2.15pm -3.15pm
Stephanie Schmidt
Flexible Foundations: building your wellbeing and resilience with flexibility from the inside out. |
In farming and rural life, we are constantly faced with unpredictability and uncertainty. If we are forced to bend on the outside but stay rigid on the inside - like rusty wire - eventually we snap. As humans we often tend to get caught up in the stories inside of our mind, our judgements and predictions about ourselves, others, and the world around us. Learn simple steps to switch off auto-pilot mode and turn on noticing mode and be aware of the present moment, to start creating change and showing up in your life as the person you truly want to be. Join Steph in this interactive workshop to build your own foundations of flexibility – so you can bend and adapt on the inside, as well as the outside. Steph will share the tools of the “Noticing Map” and the “Shared Purpose Map” – two easy-to-use tools which allow you to zoom out and gain a different perspective on tricky situations and most importantly, start taking the small steps every day towards what is most important to you. The Noticing Map focuses on your foundations as an individual, allowing you to gain a different perspective and choose the steps you can take to do what matters most, even when it’s tough. The Shared Purpose Map focuses on creating a foundation of shared purpose within your relationships – whether intimate partner relationships, farming businesses, communities or organisations. As you build the practice of implementing the Noticing and Shared Purpose Maps in your own life, you will then be able to share these tools to the people you care about.
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Tony Catt
Farming with Purpose |
How to develop a future plan for generational change of the farming operation. Dead Plan - what happens when someone dies? What is the risk management in place for this? This includes kids not outliving the parents Living Plan - this is broken into 4 key components:
All of the above needs to be put together in a well documented and well communicated manner. Most importantly it then needs to be executed - What is the Maintenance Plan from there? |
Robyn Verrall
The Business Advantage: are you a Big picture risk taker or hopeful order taker? |
My workshop will be asking each delegate if they consider their business DOA, do they have Disruptive Obtainable Advantage in their specific market? Each participant will be given a workbook and I’ll be taking business cards, they will be designing or working with their vision / mission statements to create an alternative switch to identify their correct clients. Using this statement to design their break even to financial profit point. (Identify what this is and why it is) It will involve delegate communication, participation, discussing ideas and other options to get business support. Moving out of your comfort zone to find the cheque writer not the order taker. We will work on a couple of the businesses via business cards looking at the information provided in their websites to ‘see ‘what can be improved and how to identify words that generate business rather than have people skim over it. Realistically looking at their market, is it saturated? Why are they not standing out in the crowd? How to network to successfully to get growth and Who are their collaborators and are they in company of women who mention their name in a room full of opportunity? Ending with where to next with their business or product, where is their value chain and if they want growth who and where they can go to get it. Looking at how to progress and how the imposter syndrome may the real barrier to their success. Asking themselves the What; what would happen if and changing this to, how to do this.
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Deb Purvis
The Power of people in your corner |
Life is challenging and even more so when you are juggling family and business, and within our businesses, we often spend a lot of time by ourselves. That is why it is crucial to have people in your corner, both personally and professionally. In this interactive workshop, we will provide women with an understanding of why seeking advice, opinion, help and support from others is ok, and how best to do this. We will discuss the different types of people we can seek support from, including mentors, professional advisors and those that support personal relationships and well-being. We will then go further into discussing how, with the right “team”, we can form connections that make the seemingly impossible, possible. I will provide real-world examples of my own experience in leaving a “PAYG job” to start my own rural finance business and how I realised I couldn’t do it alone. I will share the experiences I’ve had with various people in my corner, what worked and what didn’t. Mentor or Advisor, Cheerleader or Taskmaster, Business or Personal. We will have practical exercises to work through, so all attendees can walk away with an Action Plan on how to harness the “Power of People in your Corner”.
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Toolbox Talks Session 4
Concurrent Sessions - Day Two - 11.15pm -12.15pm
Margot Tesch
Women's Leadership - Unpacking the Coercive |
Building on the work I’ve done with the National Rural Women’s Coalition, I created a workshop called Coercive Leadership. In this workshop I pull apart one of Daniel Goleman’s six leadership styles: Coercive Leadership. We will consider the how and why and the benefits and limitations of this style of leadership, i.e. analyse it in detail. In addition we will - explore what coercion means - brainstorm coercive tactics - consider the role of anger and emotions in coercion - discuss gender and coercion Then the group will break into smaller groups to work through scenarios. There will be two break-out groups: the first set of scenarios consider when you might choose (or be tempted) to use coercive tactics. The second set of scenarios will consider how you might respond to coercive tactics. The scenarios over four contexts: family, work, community and personal relationships. After each breakout session, the groups will return to share their learnings. The session will conclude with “What have we learnt” brainstorming session. This workshop will create an opportunity for women to discuss and explore a difficult topic, a topic that is often not openly talked about in everyday life. It has the potential to reach women at any stage (and age) of their life and will be relevant to work, professional environments as well as home and community interactions.
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Annette Bonnett & Rebekah Cervone
Managing cashflow risk can make or break your business |
Understanding cashflow is a critical factor in the management of any business, but it plays a particularly important role in the long-term viability of Agribusinesses. Businesses in the Agribusiness sector typically experience additional pressures on their cash flow resulting from the risk of drought, bush fire, fluctuating commodity prices and poor harvests to name a few. Timing, Timing, Timing – ensuring that you fully understanding the lumpiness of the receipts and payments that are critical to the survival of your business, and this requires planning. We will explore these various risks, look at ways to identify causes of poor cashflow and provide some practical tools to assist in managing cashflow during the hard times and using surplus cashflows to your advantage. We will use case studies, industry specific knowledge and real-life businesses issues to demonstrate our key messages surrounding the importance of cashflow management.
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Han Worsley
The future of gender equality - Breaking the binary |
We know that women’s spaces, including the gender equality movement, must grow to be more inclusive. We know how important “intersectional feminism” is, and we acknowledge that we must include all kinds of women in our battle for gender equality. But how does that work when so many people directly affected by gender inequality aren’t women at all? If gender equality is about supporting people of all genders to reach parity in social, political, and professional spheres, how can we do that while leaving marginalised genders behind?
After many years working with grassroots, feminist organisations, I have learnt to navigate the gender equality space while being outside the binary. Although I don’t identify as a woman, I am the CEO of a charity that specifically targeted young women in rural areas, I regularly deliver presentations and workshops on feminism, and I proudly declare my female role models and mentors. But my identity isn’t at odds with this. Frankly, I’ve found that non-binary people have important lived experience of oppressive gender roles, and the best ways to break those down. So let’s have a conversation. What is non-binary? Why should a non-binary person speak at a women’s conference? How do we fit into the gender equality space? And how can you, your community, and your organisation, reap the benefits of true gender inclusivity? |
Emily Riggs
Farm to Fashion |
I knew launching a business wasn’t going to be easy, but I don’t think you can ever truly be prepared for the challenges that it can be thrown at you. From launching during the drought to the mess of COVID, there are certainly times when it all feels too much. But I believe what has helped me keep moving is a resilient mindset. When I was 10 years old, I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Not long after, my mum passed away from breast cancer when she was just 43. With so much to process, I turned to my love of fashion and it was during this time that I first dreamed of starting my own label. When I decided to make the leap and launch Iris & Wool, I was really clear in my vision and values for the business. I had a goal to create a low impact, sustainable fashion label and use only 100% Australian merino wool. I built my brand on the values of resilience, integrity and community to create a business that was authentic in its purpose to deliver amazing products for my customers while also giving back to the community. Having this strong foundation has really helped guide my decision making and navigate through the challenges that have come my way. In this presentation, I’ll share my personal journey that led me to start Iris & Wool, as well as the lessons I’ve learned in starting and running my own business. I would love for this to share in a more informal setting, such as a campfire, while still allowing for discussions and questions after the presentation.
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Toolbox Talks Session 5
Concurrent Sessions - Day Two - 12.15pm -1.15pm
Kat Giles
Embracing the chaos: a journey through leadership challenges |
Control. This seemingly innocuous word has played a big role in my life – and I’m guessing – yours too. Perhaps you’re like me, and always aimed to ‘control’ life. But what if instead, we choose to embrace chaos?
We are taught to set goals and work hard to achieve them. To seek guidance on what we should say and who we should connect with to be successful in achieving these goals. Goal setting is often considered foundational. And we expect the path to be linear. Sometimes though, the journey is just not as clear cut as we would like it to be. We set goals, and then we put enormous pressure on ourselves: To achieve and deliver everything right now. To be everything to everyone. To keep all the balls in the air. To break down the barriers, the glass ceilings. To overcome our hidden imposter syndrome. But then throw in life’s challenges – children, illnesses, death, relationship breakdowns. When this happens the planned journey can be completely derailed. It may result in more questions than answers. After all, life is messy. Our instinct may be to bring that messy under control and get back to what we once knew. But what if the old way is no longer possible? Or what if it no longer aligns with your values? Maybe it’s time to embrace a new way of leading. One where it’s ok to not have all the answers. Where we accept that we only have so many ‘energy tickets’ per day, and it’s essential they’re focused on the things most important to us. Where it’s ok to drop some of the balls that we’re juggling. Maybe, if by accepting that everything doesn’t have to be okay all the time, we can allow ourselves to discover something more powerful and rewarding |
Carolyn Jeffery
Harnessing the power of collaboration and connections |
The challenges of a global pandemic have highlighted the importance of community, whether that be a friend, family or others in community. Many of us have also gained a renewed appreciation of the value of loved ones, particularly those who we’ve been unable to physically connect with. We have learned that to be resilient in our personal lives, we need to reach out to others for help and support in either a formal or informal way, but we don’t seem to be as open to reaching out to others when it comes to our business and professional lives. This interactive presentation will encourage you to explore not only the opportunities that could be pursued through collaboration and connection, but also how to overcome the barriers preventing us from reaching out and working with others. We’ll look at how to look differently at others within our communities, including perceived competitors, and to see real life examples of how looking differently at collaboration and connections can bring real financial and mental health benefits, and help us move towards achieving our goals, whatever they may be. The presentation will also look at how to find suitable collaborators and connections and will encourage those in attendance to identify potential targets, prepare a plan to pursue the opportunities and also to challenge their own thinking when it comes to working with others.
The takeaways from the workshop will be:
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Sally Klose
Building resilient communities |
A presentation using the success of the Stand Like Stone Foundation as a cast study outlining the power of the community foundation model as a meaningful strategy to build resilient communities in rural and regional Australia. More than 80% of Australia’s community foundations are based in rural and regional Australia. Donations are pooled and invested with income earned granted directly back to the local community each foundation serves. This means the community builds its own sustainable source of income, responding to different community needs over time. This is particularly important for rural and regional Australia, areas that can often miss out on larger Federal and/or State funding. How can the model work in your community?
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Emily Buddle
Influencing the elephant - how to influence change when change is hard |
Change is hard. But women are change makers - we always have been. Although women are great at finding solutions and can see the vision clearly, we often hit a wall when it comes to encouraging others to make the change. We also forget that change is not an event, it is a process. If we are going to help ourselves and our communities change in the face of future trends, challenges and demands, we need to better understand the barriers to change. We need to influence the elephant. Our brains have two systems that work independently. The first side is the emotional or instinctive side that feels pleasure and pain, while the second side is our rational or reflective side that deliberates and analyses. In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes our emotional side as the elephant and our rational side as the rider. Typically, we spend a lot of time communicating with the rider because we think they have control of the situation. However, the rider’s control of the elephant is precarious because they are so small relative to the elephant. Anytime a six-tonne elephant and the rider disagree about which direction to go in, the rider is going to lose. And even when the rider and elephant work together, they need a clear path to reach their destination. This presentation will encourage the audience to think about three key concepts – the rider, the elephant and the path – and explore ways they can better support change in their life. Facilitated conversation will also allow women to think about their own situation and consider ways they can modify their approach by applying the rider, elephant, path principles to work through the process of change.
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