WASHINGTON — Engaging and tuning into communities begins with empowering female leaders and helping them reach the next level, according to Eleni (Lena) Giakoumopoulos, director of the Global Women’s Leadership Network (GWLN).
Speaking to credit union leaders, Giakoumopoulos said fostering leadership development is essential to changing the movement’s future. She urged organizations to invest in young professionals and to bring at least one emerging leader with them to next year’s gathering in order to continue shifting representation within the industry.
“One of the ways you can tune in is by empowering female leaders and helping them get to that next level,” Giakoumopoulos said. “It’s about fostering leadership and looking at the young professionals you should all be bringing here with you next year so we can continue to change those numbers in the movement.”
‘Building Connections’
She said connecting globally and engaging in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are critical to strengthening the cooperative system. Building those connections, she added, also provides opportunities to learn from other countries and financial systems.
Giakoumopoulos shared the story of a female leader in the northern Philippines who sought to serve an indigenous community that was operating outside the formal financial system. Members of the community were making and selling brooms, then burying their earnings in tin cans because they did not know of other options.
The credit union leader and her team met with the group, opened accounts for them and helped integrate them into the financial system.
“This is really about truly people helping people,” Giakoumopoulos said. “It is about the cooperative model, but more importantly it is about empowering individuals to be the best that they can be where they are and meeting them there.”
Transcending Borders
She emphasized that the cooperative system transcends national borders, cultures and languages.
“It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what culture you come from or which languages you speak,” she said. “Global is all of us together. It’s much bigger than we really think it is, and it should start in our home shops.”
Giakoumopoulos encouraged credit union professionals to connect and engage with the Global Women’s Leadership Network as part of that broader effort to strengthen communities worldwide.
