Yes. So my son actually was a patient at McMaster for a few weeks back when he, was just shy of three years old. So he was two. We woke up, well, he had kind of been struggling on and off with what we thought was a cold, for about a week. And he was right at that age where he was, walking. Like, he was walking no problem, but he still wanted to be carried a lot, but he was getting to the point where he's a little too big to carry all the time. And I remember we were at our our house, and he was at the top of our staircase. And he had been struggling with this cold and we'd been back and forth from the doctor's office with this fever and, you know, nothing was really kinda coming up. And I remember him looking at me and wanting me to pick him up and saying, mommy, carry me, carry me. And I kept saying, no, no. Like, you need to walk. You can walk. You can do it. And him, like, just being really upset about that. And I remember putting him to bed that night and noticing this little spot on his foot, just a little red spot. And I thought, I've never seen that before. It's interesting. And kind of kept an eye on it. And the next day, the spot had grown, but it had grown with a line going up his leg. And I thought that really isn't good, and had a fever again. And we took him to Grand River here locally in in Kitchener, Waterloo first. And they ran a whole bunch of tests, a whole bunch of microbiology tests and blood work and things like that. And sure enough, it came back that he had a pretty severe, staph infection that had happened. And it was pretty clear immediately after about a day and a half to a couple days at, Grand River, they weren't equipped to handle it. And we went to McMaster. And from the moment we stepped foot in the McMaster hospital, the care that we received was unbelievable. The facilities in themselves, the way they care for the whole family unit, it's not just about the patient, although there is an enormous amount of care provided to to him or was to him. It was the whole family. My son has has four parents. He has myself and my husband who's a stepfather and his dad and his stepmother. So there were a lot of worried parents and a lot of panicked parents around him, and they cared for all of us so deeply. When tests would come back with kind of funny results or he wasn't responding to medication the way he was supposed to, or he needed to have a PICC line put in, which is in itself just a really, you know, a bit of a complicated procedure for someone that little, They just were so good at explaining everything to us and making sure that we didn't feel stupid about what we were asking or looking for information. And it was wonderful. Like, it was absolutely, wonderful the care that we received. Received. And so we've supported Mac ourselves individually since that time. My son's now nine years old. But when Mandy and I were talking about this, I think, you know, out of was one of the first two questions. The first question I I think was, can you guarantee me I'm not gonna break my nose? To which she responded, I can't do that, but it's probably unlikely. And then the second was, well, where did these funds go? And when she said McMaster, it was just like, okay, well, where do I sign up and how do I get started on this? And so that's why we're doing it. And my son, you know, he's right up into all of this. He I come home from practices and he, you know, asked me how it goes. I'm generally incredibly sweaty. My face looks like a tomato. He'll talk about fight night with me, and he'll talk about strategy and things like that. And he knows that it's all going for McMaster, and, he still has his scars from the hospital that he will tell anybody about who asks. So it just it just made sense.

That's such a great story. I'm so glad that you're doing this because it really ties everything together, what the champions for charity is all about, but then you're still getting in the ring and you're really doing it for real. So I I wanna go back because your your son noticed that you come home sweaty. Talk to us about the training. I mean, you said fourteen weeks. How many days a week and, like, are you just hitting a bag? I'm assuming not if it's with Mandy. So I'm assuming you're going full out. What does that look like?

We are going full out. So it is our team. So each team is a team of ten. So I'm on the blue team, and it's five men, five women. So we have, kind of mandatory three day a week. Well, we started with three day a week sessions. Now it's four days a week where we, we now have three days at the gyms. We use Sid Fit, because Sid Fit obviously, he Sid opens the facilities to all of us to train, which is incredible. And I just have to say that the level of training that we receive, just to think that we're being trained by national national champions, Olympians, like the top tier boxers are the ones who are training us for for this fight is just incredible. But it also means that they put us through the paces. Like, they are not taking it easy on us whatsoever. You know, when you show up at that gym, I think the very first day, our our sessions are in the evening at seven thirty. And the very first day, we all kinda showed up right before seven thirty, ready to get all geared up. And they said, no, no, no. You're here before, and you are, like, warmed up, ready to go, and you're working as of seven thirty. And so our team has done that. And we show up and you know that it's going to be hard. It's gonna be intense. Physically, it is one of the hardest things I've I've ever done. But you form such a community with your team. I think we joke a lot by saying we've only really ever seen each other in our most disgusting states, in the sweatiest, like, hardest, like, I can't do this, moments. That's how we built our friendships, with each other. So I think it's gonna be a shock on fight night to see us all in actual nice evening wear and things like that after our fights. We started with just hitting pads. We're right into sparring now. So we do our conditioning. We do our warm ups. We do our technique training, and then it's right into getting paired up and sparring with each other and practicing actually hitting each other and blocking and moving and things like that. So, for, I think, majority of us, at least for majority of the women, we have never hit anyone before. We've never punched anyone in the face before. And so that has in itself been a learning, curve to still love the person that you're watching, but actually need to recognize that you're also doing sport, and so you need to do that. But it's, it is a commitment, and it's a commitment for the whole family. It's a commitment for my husband because he's home with the kids while I train, a commitment for my my kids to know that I'm out training for a certain number of times a week. But it's also just so exciting and brings so much joy to our family and joy to, you know, knowing that this event is going to happen, that it absolutely makes it worth it.

Wow. Yeah. I can imagine the commitment. But even just describing the training, I mean, good for you. Before you even get it in the ring, good for you. That's incredible. Mhmm. That's incredible. Can you tell us who you're boxing against?

I know that I am boxing against Jill Lowery. Jill and I don't really know each other, but we started following each other. From what I can see, she looks incredible. She looks like an absolutely amazing woman. The work that she does with the United Way looks absolutely amazing. And so I'm trying to not let that kind of, like, creep into my head, because I know we need to get in the ring and we need to fight off against each other, but I think we also just automatically have a lot of mutual respect for each other as well. So I'm sure at the end of the fight, regardless of who wins, we'll hug it out and and continue a relationship post post ring.

Yes. You can be friends after the phone. Right? Yes.

Yes. Yeah.

So how can people support your fundraising efforts for this event?

So you can go to the Champs for Charity page. That's the best way to support, and you can support all of our fighters. You can support the events in particular, like, as a whole if you'd like, or you can go to the blue team's page, and avoid all the red team

if you want,

and just come and support the blue team or support me specifically, through that. Yeah. Definitely check out the page. Check out all the fighters. Our stories are on there. Our pages are up there. We're all just community members. We are all just people who have never picked up boxing gloves before, and we've jumped into this. And so all and any support is definitely appreciated.

Well, we'll put all of those links in the show notes, and and I think everybody should check it out because it it's a great cause, and it's such a great event. So good luck is what I wanna say. Thank you. Let's take a moment. Beth and the champions for charity team are working hard to reach their goal of five hundred thousand dollars for McMaster Children's Hospital. It's an incredible effort. If you wanna support Beth in the ring and help make a real difference, the donation link is in the show notes. Now let's talk about the Femina Collective. This is what first caught my attention when I started looking into Beth's story. I spoke to Mandy about talking to some of the people involved with the brawl at Tapestry Hall. And when I looked at the list, I knew I wanted to talk to Beth. She's built a successful career in the mining industry, an industry that I imagined was a tough place for women. I wanted to understand what her experience had been like, how she navigated it, and how that led her to create the Femina Collective, which started with a simple Zoom call and evolved into a thriving space where women in mining could support one another. Now I admit, I don't know a lot about the mining industry, but I do know this. Women weren't allowed to work in the underground mines in Canada until the late nineteen eighties. Think about that for a minute. That's not ancient history. That's a generation ago. And that's all I needed to hear to know that the work Beth is doing is necessary. So how did three Zoom calls lead to the founding of the Femina Collective? Let's find out. So let's move on from boxing and into your, what we'll say, quote, unquote, day job, which is relatively new, actually. So can you tell us a little bit about the Feminine Collective and what inspired you to start it?

Yes. Absolutely. So for those listening, I work in the mining industry, which most people here in Canada don't realize how significant mining is to our country and to our GDP. And I come from working, within a company specific role, and working on the precious metal side. So that means gold, silver, copper, things like that. And my background was generally always in the community development, social and governance, ESG pieces or sustainability. And I was kind of when I started my mining journey, I was, thrown into it a little bit, from someone who was in my network, who worked in mining as well, who kind of saw that I had a community development background, socioeconomic background, and thought you would be really interesting in mining. Let me see who I can connect you with. And so he was a he was a, really, the sole reason I ended up in the industry and my my career progressed really quickly, into this executive role. But mining in itself is also can be a very difficult place for women. It is very male dominated. It's very traditional. It's a very, wealthy industry, very resource rich industry, and it hasn't always been welcoming to women. So much so that women actually were not allowed in underground mines in Canada until the late nineteen eighties. And so you can imagine that even when the laws came into place or women were allowed to go underground, there was still a lot of stigma around it as do you want women on your crew, do they bring bad luck, all of those sorts of things. I am the first generation of woman who is actually able to build a career in this industry to be able to go underground if I want to be able to work as an operator or in any realm of the industry. And so when I was brought into the industry and brought into holding this role, it wasn't, unanimously accepted, with those around me, my peers and colleagues around me, particularly some of the older men who really couldn't understand why a young woman was being given such a, quote, unquote, powerful role in the company with so much, influence and responsibility. And it was hard. It was hard to work against that and hard to gain the respect of our site, teams, hard to gain respect of other members of our corporate team. And one day, right as the pandemic was hitting, my job required me to be on a plane pretty much all the time. And right when the pandemic happened, it was that early March. I was at the airport and I got a call from my CEO, and he said, just stay on the ground for a couple weeks. And so that happened, and I was home. And while I was home, I thought, there have to be other women in this industry who are my age, who are ambitious, who are holding senior level roles or executive roles. They've gotta be out there. And I, you know, had been to all the luncheons, and I've been to all the networking events, and those are all great, but they are not a way that I connect. I connect one on one with people. I connect by building community with people. And so when I was at our office one day during these moments of we were sort of let outside and sort of not, I was looking outside, and I just thought, I'm gonna send a Zoom link out to a couple women who I know, and we're gonna connect, and I'm just gonna see how everyone's doing. And I did. We had six women on the call. There were a couple from the company I worked for and a couple from, another company, and we had this really beautiful call. I like, I can remember it, like it was yesterday. It just felt so natural and so authentic, and we all just showed up as ourselves, not as our titles, not as our companies, not as, you know, what we need to fulfill that day from a professional setting, but really just as women working in the industry and sharing both the challenges and successes. And so it went so well that we said, let's do this next quarter. Let's just make sure we're okay. We're gonna check-in. And by the fourth call, we had forty six women from sixteen companies across Canada just joining and just wanting to find other women and build community. And so at that point, they started looking at me and saying, what are you doing with this? Are you gonna build this? Like, we really like this. And I said no right away. I was like, this is crazy. I can't take on anything else. I was holding, my role. I have my family. And so I said no, but the need kept coming and women kept showing up. And we kept having these calls and they kept growing. And I thought, you know what? If no no one else is gonna do it, it's gonna be me. And so I went to my CEO at the time, and I told him what was going on and what had happened with these calls. And I asked if he wanted it to be part of my portfolio with the company that he wanted me to build it out for or if I could build it on my own. And he said, build it on your own. We'll support you any way that we can, but this is your thing, so go and see what you can do with it. And so Femina Collective was born, and we were born as a membership based organization in the mining industry to support women in their kind of as their holistic self, not just in their career progression, but understanding that as women, we need different things, we want different things, and we come to the table with different responsibilities. And so we started as a membership organization and then have just continued to grow, our influence since then.

Wow. That's amazing that, three Zoom links ended up, where you are today. So your reach now, I understand, is international. Is that correct?

It is. Our community now is just under four thousand people, around the globe. We have members in Canada, the US, Europe, and Australia. Our memberships, we now offer three different types of memberships, based on where women are in their career, what type of work that they're doing, as well as, we are launching our Femina investment, which really looks at how women, leverage the natural resource industry for their own wealth generation. So we continue to grow and evolve very rapidly, considering this is our fifth year now. We've had quite an impact, and we just, we just keep growing, which is pretty phenomenal.

Yeah. That's very fast.

We really focus on our individual members. So our members generally pay for their membership fees themselves. They don't pay through company funding. They come on and they invest in themselves to come and build community with other women. And because of that, we really just wanna make sure that every woman that comes through our doors feels like she is the best version of herself so that when we're going out there and we're doing the jobs that are hard and we have to prove ourselves a little bit more and we have to do a little bit more work, we know we have a whole group of people behind us that we can fall back on, to continue building ourselves and growing.

I love that. It's such a important thing to have a space for the person or for the women because it can get messed up in all kinds of other things. And so to provide that focus must be very much appreciated by your membership group, I would think.

Totally. And I think one of the things that we realized when we started splitting out our memberships, and, we have one membership that's called the experience. And it is our more higher end, higher curated membership that is specifically for c suite and executive women in the industry. And the reason we developed that membership was because we were naturally watching our membership base grow, which was wonderful. But with that came women from all different, points in their career, more some more junior, some more senior. And we were automatically watching the women who are in these more senior roles start mentoring the the younger women, the women in more junior roles. And no one was complaining about this. Everyone was doing it just very naturally. I think it was just instinct for us women. But what I was really realizing was that it was then becoming limited the support that those more senior and executive women were getting. And we tend to just think that once women reach a certain level in their career, like, hooray, good for you. You've made it. You don't need anything else. You're set. You're done. Now turn and look to pull up other women. And the fact of the matter is is we still have so much of our career that we want to achieve. We still have so much more life to live. We still have so much more that we want to do. And so why do we stop providing the same sorts of support, for women at that level? And so we built the experience specifically to bring in coaching, both professional and personal coaching, and opportunities to connect as a group because we understand their needs are different. Different. And it's a lot of work because it's not a blanket solution for everybody. But when you see the connection start happening and you see the network building, there's just a there's just an incredible rippling effect that we're seeing kind of throughout the industry just based on saying to women, yeah. You get to show up and you get to be who you wanna be, and we're gonna help you achieve whatever you wanna achieve both in your career and life. And watching them take that confidence and go and just absolutely rock it.

Well, good for you for recognizing that reaching the c suite isn't the end and the assumption that your problems and challenges disappear. I would think they probably multiply. And I I I'm part of a couple of groups that are for the highest woman kind of in the organization, and you need a place to go and talk about some of your struggles. You have to have a safe space to say this is what I am struggling with, and this is what I need help with.

Yep. I remember when I when I got my VP title, I was thirty two or thirty three, so very young for for getting that. And I remember going on a walk with the woman who now actually is one of our main coaches for the experience group. She's been a friend of mine for years here in KW. And I remember going for a walk with her and being equally really excited that I had just got this role and that I was now a director of the company. It's a publicly traded company. Like, it was a big deal, and it was a lot of responsibility. But then also at the same time, having this panic moment of being like, I'm I'm getting to the top so fast. What's left for me? What what else is there for me? And I'm not even in my mid thirties yet, and thinking, like, what happens by the time I'm forty? Have I just have I just tapped out? Have I just done it all? Because I couldn't see what else was out there or what else could be created. And so I think that that my own experience with that while also watching some of these other women as they're kind of facing, you know, the, quote, unquote, top of their career, making sure that they know they still get to create and build and develop past whatever your title is. It's about building the life you want. It's about building the dreams that you want, and your career fits in that. It's not that you build your career and fit your life into it and that that gets stalled wherever your, you know, success ends up. But you have to flip that and know that there's so much more and that we're not just our worth is not just tied to what our titles are and what our career is. Our worth is in the life that we are living and what we wanna be building, and making room for that.

So true. And the sooner we all figure that out, the better off.

Oh my gosh. I know. I know.

So listen. Right now, this is an important lesson.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. An important lesson and a very hard one to live, because we do get it we do get it, flipped around a lot of the time as well. So I also still still have to remind myself of that all the time.

Well and that's another thing. There's no endgame with that either. It's a constant practice almost of remembering to do it that way. So you mentioned the male dominated industry, and I understand I come from automotive, and we often talk about the challenges women face. But through your work with the feminine collective, do you have some inspirational success stories?

Oh my gosh. Every single woman that comes through our doors to me is a is an inspirational success story. I think recently, some of the really big wins that we have had is we've been able to place some of our members on public boards. That's a huge deal.

Wow. That's so great. That's such a big deal. Yes.

Because we know that there are requirements, for Canadian boards, especially if you are publicly traded to have diversity on your boards. And let's hope and pray that that doesn't go away anytime soon. But because of the caliber of the women that we have in our in our network and in our memberships, we started having, recruiters come in, like, executive recruiters come and knock on our door and say, we need to fill roles. Our clients want them to be women. We don't have women in our kind of Rolodex. Can you help us? And so we did. We have we, we we we also initially laughed and thought, my goodness. My goodness. We are in twenty twenty five, and how is this the case? But, also grateful that they have come to us. So we have recently placed placed a member on one of Canada's graphite, companies, one of their boards. We have watched our members take on, higher executive and c suite positions. We've been able to network members together when we know of roles with these recruiters, to be able to get them into places where it is much harder for women to get to on their own. And I think our our brand is getting associated with with being able to place people and connect people in that way as well. And we know particularly in mining that if you're at the board seat or you're in the in the executive, you have a lot more decision making power and a lot more ability to help shape how the company works and performs, not just from a people centric approach, but we know companies are more profitable. We know they're safer, which is a huge thing in in mining to ensure that health and safety is number one. And we know that they're more efficient when and when women are, helping make decisions. And so the fact that we get to play in that space and continue to place women in those roles, is pretty powerful for us.

Well, congratulations. That's such an accomplishment, really, and I hope that you just keep going. I think it's so great for your industry and but for women in general because, you know, when we see it happen, we can all believe we can do it too. So that's fantastic.

Oh my gosh. I feel like it is so linked to everything that we just shared. So I have to say my my podcast host, Carmen Turner, is based out in Vancouver. And her and I actually were connected, when I first started with, the mining company that I was with because I was given such a big role right off the bat without having a mining background. She was actually brought in to coach me, and she was brought in because she was a sustainability professional. So we met that way where she really helped me in my own, development and establishing within my executive role. And throughout the years, we just became friends. And I remember one of the times we were doing a coaching session together, and she asked me to just, you know, take off any limitations that I had and just talk about if I could vision envision anything I wanted for myself, what would it be? And the thing that it was was that I wanted to lead a women owned and women led organization. And this was before any concept of femina was on the table whatsoever. And I wrote it down, and I said, I don't know why that's coming to mind, but that's that. And I don't I cannot see a path to get there. Like, I'm on this one trajectory. That's it. And so it was kind of forgotten. And then when Femina started coming, she really worked with me with the concept of Femina. And then when I left my my role with the company, it was when I became pregnant with my daughter after six years of fertility. There was a management changeover at the company. Our values were not aligned. It was kind of this moment where everything that I had been building all of a sudden was, like, not what I expected it to be anymore. And so I found myself, five months pregnant, no longer had a job, which I think the biggest worrying thing for that was I didn't have a maternity leave. I wasn't entitled to a maternity leave anymore. I had picked up contracts. I thankfully, my reputation was strong enough in the industry, but I was kind of in this this rebuild of my own without having that terminology. And Carmen and I had always talked about, you know, one day we're actually gonna do something together. It's not either me gonna be helping her with her thing or her helping me with mine. We were gonna do something together. And my daughter was born late December twenty twenty three and February of twenty twenty four when she was six weeks old or or somewhere around there. I was walking, in Victoria Park with her, and I was listening to a podcast, the We Can Do Hard Things podcast with Lennon Doyle, and Abby Wambach. And they were talking about sister in that podcast brought up this concept of sports teams, how they go through a rebuild, and how they intentionally go through it knowing that when they go through that rebuild, they're pretty much gonna suck. Like, they're kinda trying out new players. They're trying out new things. They're not going for the win. They're not going for the championship, but they're rebuilding so that they can get to that within the next three to five years. And I know Carmen listens to that podcast, and we always talk about that podcast. And I sent her a voice note, while I was walking because it stopped me in my tracks. And I said, Carmen, we have to do a podcast specifically around this idea and around the idea of what happens when life expectedly or unexpectedly throws you a curve ball and you're in a one eighty and everything that you thought you were building and everything you thought you wanted to achieve, all of a sudden becomes totally obsolete, and you're stuck thinking, what the heck is next? And so we chatted about it back and forth, and then we just decided to start recording and start putting stuff out. And we did. We released in June of last year, of twenty twenty four, and we are currently in our second season, right now, and releasing episodes. But it is all about that idea, men and women, of the concept of rebuilding and very much came out of my own of coming out of this corporate job, leaning into femina, having a baby, having life. I have a nine year old and a one year old. Like, that's a big age difference and a lot of learning and a lot of forgetting of newborn stage that happens in eight years. Let me tell you. And so it was kind of my way of walking through my own story, figuring out my own life and what was happening, but also then connecting with her and with other people who are also going through it because it's so natural. And I think you said it earlier just in in as we've been chatting, it's like there's no end point. It just keeps going and things keep evolving and there's no end point. And we like to have end points because it makes us feel like we've achieved something or we've done something, but that's just not life. And so it's normalizing the the idea that it's okay when things don't work out as we planned, because we're smart and capable people, and we're probably gonna do even bigger and better things, if we just allow ourselves the grace to go through those rebuilds.

Wow. I I love that podcast origin story. It's probably one of the best I've ever heard.

Oh, thank you. That's amazing. Thank you very much.