Dear Members,

Welcome to another brand new year!

This year, we have already kicked off our intense events calendar with an inspiring talk by leadership coach, Margie Warrell, on how to overcome your self-doubt to achieve your greatest goals, on 15 January. A very apt opening act to the year, in particular as FWA is itself undergoing significant investment in our infrastructure upgrade this year to overcome the inconveniences that you may have been facing the past years in renewing membership, signing up to our events, or making payments for the mentoring programme, with the ultimate objective being to improve your membership experience.

We ask for your kind patience with the FWA Exco as we do our best to expedite the resolution of some of these infrastructure-related hiccups, but would also like to remind everyone of the critical importance of following the instructions for online payments as this has a huge impact on the system's ability to reconcile your payment with our back-end records.

FWA has also looked into upgrading other aspects of admin support to bolster the efforts of the Exco which are made up entirely of volunteers. This should facilitate quicker replies to the queries you send to us as part of the overall efforts to improve the membership experience.

We would like to thank all of you for your continued support to FWA, especially with regards to the overwhelming interest in our events. It is truly heartening to know that the events we painstakingly organise are well-received. In this regard, we also seek your kind understanding that events tend to be fully-subscribed on a constant basis, and that the constraint of the physical venue has meant we have had to decline some members. Rest assured we are looking into ways to increase our event capacities, either virtually or physically, and will keep engaging our Corporate sponsors and speakers for feedback on how to best achieve this.

On the more exciting front, we look forward to aligning ourselves with the 2018 International Women's Day theme, "Press for Progress", in engaging more of our male colleagues to think, act and be gender-inclusive. As usual we look forward to the support of our Male Champions to help us cascade the message across the industry. Our Mentoring Programme is also undergoing a refresh this  year, having taken on feedback from past batches for further improvement.

More investments and improvement plans will be discussed at our upcoming AGM in March. Do look out for the notice soon. 

Once again, we thank you our members for sticking by us. The FWA Exco remains open to receiving any feedback as well as any interest to join us in our volunteer efforts.

With Warmest Regards,

Fiona Yik
President