Mentoring Through Quad Cities ATHENA Leadership Awards

Nominations being accepted for September High Tea

By Bonnie Stevens, QCBN

The Quad Cities ATHENA Leadership Awards not only celebrate, recognize and honor women for their leadership skills, career achievements, community service and mentorship, they also promote what leadership looks like. ATHENA recipients say this is powerful because younger or less experienced women in the workplace can identify local role models they can talk to, observe in action and learn from.

“Leaders become mentors for others and impact future growth,” said 2022 ATHENA recipient Teri Drew, executive director of NACOG’s Yavapai County Workforce Development, in a 2022 QCBN interview. “My parents and siblings were and continue to be my mentors. They taught me what to and not to do growing up, and those strong ethics pay off.”

On Sunday, Sept. 24, women from across the region will come together at Starting Point in the Prescott Gateway Mall for the 4th Annual Quad Cities ATHENA Leadership Awards High Tea, presented by Quad Cities Business News. They will hear stories of struggle and triumph, perseverance through fear and how to tap into their inner strength in times of adversity. They will also learn how women lean into their core values and their hopes for the future.

“I believe my life is a blessing and given as a blessing. Giving back is just what I believe I need to do. Mentoring others is one of my tenets and receiving the ATHENA award strengthened that,” said 2018 Flagstaff ATHENA recipient Theresa Bierer, an associate professor of practice in management in the W.A. Franke College of Business at Northern Arizona University. “In our lives, everyone is so busy, but what really makes the fabric of a community is people who step outside of themselves and put others and community first. To me, that’s what the ATHENA Award embodies.”

This year, QCBN will recognize an individual with the traditional ATHENA Leadership Award and also will present the ATHENA Young Professional Leadership Award. In addition, for the first time in Northern Arizona, the Quad Cities ATHENA Leadership Awards will celebrate a business or organization that supports, develops and honors women leaders with the ATHENA Organizational Leadership Award.

Individuals, businesses and organizations are encouraged to nominate extraordinary women leaders who are making a difference in their communities and pioneering a path for others to impact the future.

“My hope for young women entering the workplace is for them to do what they love and love what they do,” added Drew.

Nominations are being accepted until Friday, Aug. 4, at prescottathena.com. QCBN

SEWING continued from page 36 with the City of Tucson and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and has become overloaded with demand.

Winslow Economic Development Director Una Wirkebau is inspired as well. She says there’s growing interest in the area right now from land developers, manufacturers and businesses, and she believes having a trained skilled workforce with commercial sewing skills will be a valuable asset for attracting more employers. She notes the high unemployment rate in Navajo County and on the Navajo Nation, and believes this initiative could create lasting change.

“There is a wonderful opportunity for entrepreneurs to take these skills and run with them,” she said. “As long as they have an industrial sewing machine, they can start their own business and work from home. We see this as having a multi-generational impact on families where a mom, a son, a grandmother, for example, could all be creating work to bring in money for the household.”

Wirkebau shares the vision with Moonshot for a locally grown workforce, using Arizona cotton and becoming a hub for sewing needs globally. She says that an empty Winslow textile warehouse, known locally as “the hat factory,” could become part of the picture. “There’s more than enough work out there that we can easily fill that location if someone has the passion for making this happen. This goes beyond economic development in local neighborhoods. Oh my goodness, there are so many possibilities. We are right on Interstate 40 and we have a train depot.”

Stephanie Pierotti is the executive director for the Arizona Stitch Lab at Moonshot. “There is gap in the skilled labor market and it’s a national challenge,” she said. “It was a surprise to me to learn of the great need for industrial sewing skills. There’s a trade union for theater in Arizona, for example, the International Alliance of Theatrical State Employees (IASTE), that has a large need for repairing curtains and other cloth components for theaters in Phoenix and the surrounding area. We want to make Arizona a hub for the sewn goods industry, and create awareness that we do have a skilled labor workforce here and we can handle jobs from all over the country and all over the world.”

Pierotti says working with the Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Tucson has been a great fit. “Sewing is part of Arizona’s indigenous culture and this program is creating awareness about how valuable and marketable that skill is. We are discovering so many jobs that require commercial sewers that we didn’t know existed. Right now, much of that work is being sent overseas.”

The Tucson program connected with Erika Yngve to be the Moonshot entrepreneur in residence. Together with Yngve, the Moonshot team creat-