Talk about a walk with a difference, making a difference! It was my privilege and pleasure to participate on Saturday in the 2016 Global Mentoring Walk, which is part of the Vital Voices intiative to celebrate International Women’s Day. The walk provides a platform for phenomenal collaboration between established and emerging women leaders, drawing them together in many countries across the world to walk in their community, by contrast to the more formal setting of typical work environments. In the process, they get ‘to discuss their professional challenges and successes while forming a mentoring relationship, in which the established leader guides, advises, inspires and supports an emerging leader’.

Congratulations and thanks to Hema Vallabh of The Passionate Professional, who is an alumna of the Fortune Global Women’s Mentoring Program and a Vital Voices Global Leader, as well as our national flag bearer for the Global Mentoring Walk in South Africa. She once again convened an exceptional group of mentors and mentees alike, taking care beforehand to match each pair brilliantly, thereby catalysing far-reaching benefits for all parties.

Having covered last year’s event, we had created a portfolio of photos that highlighted the branding, as well as a video that captured the vibrant, empowering morning. This provided an effective marketing tool for Hema, with this year’s Mentoring Walk offering the opportunity to combine images from both events, in order to contribute to more generic coverage that is not date-specific. This is a strategy to consider for your own visual marketing purposes, whereby you could plan to incorporate content from multiple events on different days, in order to create a highlights package of photos and videos that represent the nature of your offering, as opposed to specific functions.

It’s so inspiring to be involved with dynamic, visionary women such as Hema and the Vital Voices Global Leadership Network, which is an organisation of leaders who are passionate about paying it forward and investing in the next generation of women leaders. For their part, The Passionate Professional is an incubator that is focused on developing leaders through mentorship by means of events such as this Mentoring Walk, as well as a range of other offerings like their Mentorship Musings chapter. For more information on their events and mentoring opportunities, visit their website here.