Meeting tonight cancelled due to power cut

There has been a power cut in Solihull tonight and therefore the meeting is being rearranged.

An Invitation for all babes and briefcasers - 2 Nov 2007

Dear Babes & Briefcase,


I would like to offer you this special invitation to join me for a pre-talk
glass of wine and canapes at 7pm next Friday 02 November .


You will be able to mingle in this informal setting with people from :


Political world

Cllr. David Stanley (The Lord Mayor of Dudley) and Cllr. Jill Nicholls (Mayor's Consort).


Entertainment World

Trish Adudu, Radio presenter, BBC Radio Coventry & Warwickshire,

Hap Bains, Multi Media Sales Executive, Raj TV (Sky channel 177)


Inspirational World

An inspirational woman from Worcester who has suffered the devastation of the sudden death
of her 3yr-old daughter and has written a children's book as a result. A book to help siblings
through their own time of loss and grief.

This book puts an supporting arm around not only the other children, but also around the
adults to help them through their pain too.


Business Networking World

Some new people that you may wish to add to your network of contacts.



My Talk - "Seriously, are you taking the Peace?"


Then settle down to hear my humorous one hour talk from 7:20pm (with 10mins following
for any questions).

All the details about my talk and how to book can be see on The Herbert's website :

http://www.theherbert.org/whatsOn/eventDetail.asp?eventID=558


I do hope that you will be able to join me and my other special guests for what is going to be an
exciting evening.

Best Regards,

Jim Jim Parkes. Author of; "Seriously, are you taking the Peace?" Endorsed by Brian Tracy. www.peacetakers.com

Women's Enterprise Week 12th - 18th November 2007

Women’s Enterprise Day in Enterprise Week: 12th - 18th November 2007
Enterprise Week is a national celebration to encourage more young people to turn their ideas into reality. It’s huge – last year alone saw 3,184 inspiring events attended by 445,000 people.

There is a special focus on Women’s Enterprise Day on the 14th November. A resource toolkit will be available for download from October on the Enterprise Week website www.enterpriseweek.org/womensenterprise. This will contain flyers providing ideas for events, press and web copy templates, leaflets and booklets. Also if you are looking for inspirational women to speak at your events please contact alex@makeyourmark.org.uk

If you know of a school that may wish to run an event let us know at Info@babesandbriefcase.co.uk.

Women of the year luncheon

Dear all,
I am delighted to invite you, and your network members in the Midlands Region, to the prestigious Women of the Year Luncheon & Awards on Friday 5th October 2007 at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole.

The event will include a drinks reception, luxury stalls, a sumptuous three-course lunch, Rosemary Conley as our keynote speaker, a fashion show presented by Selfridges Birmingham - and of course the Award Ceremony. We aim to net £30,000 for the charity Vitalise, which will provide a staggering 85 week-long breaks for disabled people and carers.

This is a particularly exciting year to attend as it will be the Luncheon's 25th anniversary, so as well as it being a very high-profile event, we will be pulling out all the stops to make it a really spectacular and memorable day. Our key sponsors include SCC, John Lewis, Browne Jacobson, Bravissimo, Jaguar, Business Link, Secantor and Tirebuck Recruitment. The event provides guests with a fantastic networking opportunity – we are expecting up to 800 ABC1 Midlands-based businesswomen.

To buy tickets, or to find out more about this unique event, please visit www.womenoftheyear.org.uk – you can download ticket booking forms there. If you would like to nominate any friends, colleagues or contacts for the prestigious Businesswoman of the Year Award, you can download a nomination form from the Awards section of the website. Absolute modesty is often a characteristic of highly successful women, and we cannot expect suitable candidates to select themselves; so if you know anyone deserving of recognition in the business arena, please do not hesitate to nominate them asap!

For further details, you can contact me on my direct line (020) 7017 3437 or at events@vitalise.org.uk. Meanwhile, I’d be grateful if you could circulate this email to your members.

We hope to see you in October!

Best wishes,
Sophie Cox

Mellow Yellow in Chiswick

Yellow Umbrella Day - free family festival - Sunday 23rd September 2007 Now in its fifth year, Yellow Umbrella Day is Chiswick's largest annualcharity event and Chiswick Park's celebrated family festival. There will be entertainment for all the family, including a Mad ScienceShow, a BBQ, cartoonist, bouncy castle, crazy golf, street entertainers,face painters and creative games for the kids. There will also be lots of fantastic live music, including sets fromMercury Artist, Lucie Silvas and a Commitments tribute band as well as asponsored 5KM walk and 10KM run that will start and finish at ChiswickPark. The day will raise money for three children's charities; Brainwave -giving therapy to children with special needs, The Log Cabin - andisabled children's playground and The Shooting Star Children's Hospice- providing care for terminally ill children. We are also holding a Grand Prize Draw with the chance to win amazingprizes including a Family Holiday to Disneyland Paris, a BMW Z4 or MiniCooper (for the weekend), a 3 course dinner for two at Annie'sRestaurant in Chiswick. The event is kindly sponsored by Annie's Restaurant Chiswick, HR Owen,Schroders and Stanhope. For further information, to buy raffle tickets or to take part in thewalk or run, please see www.yellowumbrelladay.com<http://www.yellowumbrelladay.com/> or email info@yellowumbrelladay.com

Networking on the run

You may have seen that everywoman is organising groups to take part in the 5K Hydro Active Women's Challenge 2007 being held in London, Liverpool and Birmingham on Sunday 16th September.

We're hoping to raise £10,000 for Refuge and we have received good support so far. I am contacting you to ask if you might be able to help encourage further support by placing some details on your website to encourage more people to sign up to the Birmingham City Centre run? The closing date for entries is 17 August and so aspiring runners will need to sign up as soon as possible.

Refuge is a very worthwhile cause, domestic violence is a major social problem with devastating consequences. One woman in four experiences domestic violence during her lifetime and every day Refuge staff see the black eyes, the broken bones, the bruises and the trauma. Refuge acts as a lifeline to the thousands of women and children who turn to them each year.

There is no minimum fundraising target for this event, but we would ask that runners try to raise as much money as possible! If everywoman can raise £10,000 it could enable trained staff to counsel and advise up to 200 women who have experienced domestic violence, helping them to take back control of their lives.

All runners have to do is email me (sherri@everywoman.co.uk) with their name and email address and I will send them registration details.

Everywoman Awards - Closing date - 31 August 2007

Remember the closing date for nominations for The everywoman Awards is 31 August and so there is still time to enter yourselves or a fellow woman in business.

The NatWest everywoman Awards celebrates inspirational business women who have achieved significant success - particularly those who have overcome adversities such as financial constraints, social disadvantages or skills gaps.

Finalists and winners of these awards get the most amazing PR and their business will gain further credibility and well-deserved recognition.

To enter, simply download these forms:
The Artemis, Demeter, Athena, Hera and Iris Awards nomination form.
The Spirit of everywoman Award nomination form.

Further information about the Awards is available on our website.

Board Members Required

Capita Resourcing is assisting the Department of Trade and Industry to recruit board members for eight of the English Regional Development Agencies (RDAs).

We are recruiting for members now, but these opportunities come up every year or so, so if you think the timing is not quite right at the moment, we will contact you again when further opportunities arise.

The RDAs are non-departmental public bodies with a primary role as strategic drivers of regional economic development. They help businesses compete and create opportunities for employment. They facilitate innovation and promote sustainable development. And they improve regional infrastructure, revitalising both urban and rural areas.

RDA board members use their strategic awareness of the complex issues affecting their regions, as well as their strong communication skills and credibility within their sectors, for the greater good. They join other men and women who represent a wide range of interests – business, education, local government, the voluntary sector, and trade unions – to ensure good governance and oversee each region’s economic strategy.

Advantage West Midlands is currently seeking two Board Members, one representing business and one representing the voluntary sector. These members will need to commit a minimum of two days per month for an initial period of three years. New board members are recruited on a yearly basis. Further information and an online application process are available at www.rdaappointments.co.uk. Applicants without access to the internet can contact 08700 435060, quoting reference RDA001. The deadline for applications for this campaign is Friday 29th June at 4 p.m.

Support World Fairtrade Day - 12th May

The focus for this year's event is kids and Fairtrade. For further information go to http://www.ethicalsuperstore.com/.

Get the kids into science

With the shortage of scientists in the country and with a threat that our skilled workforce is moving overseas, why not get your kids into science now so that they can be the Einsteins of the future. Here are some tips.

• Throw a science party. Forget the disco parties, get yourselve a science party pack from http://www.scienceyear.com/parents/index.html?page=/parents/party_time/index.html and let the kids see some real action.
• Watch Nina and the Neurones on CBeebies for some creative science and some good songs
• Take the kids to the ThinkTank to experience the sights, senses and sounds of everyday science including the flushing of a toilet that really appeals to young kids. For the website go here. http://www.thinktank.ac/
• Get the kids in the garden looking for bugs but maybe discourage any biological experimentation.
• Buy a chemistry set and make things go bang.
• Have fun!

Happy Mothers Day

Are you worried about buying your mother something for Mother's Day that will not be boring and just for the sake of it. Buy a present with a difference from one of the charity giving sites such as http://savethechildren.sandbag.uk.com/index2.html?gclid=CKDb99rv-4oCFQTolAodjRa_Fw or http://www.charity-gift.co.uk/.

If you would like to get your mom 100 school dinners in the third world for £6 go to http://www.oxfamunwrapped.com/?gclid=CLTd_ojw-4oCFQXmlAodf3oHGg.

Do something special for Mother's Day and give more people a treat.

New Forum

Check out our exciting new forum on the website where you can ask questions, answer questions and gain important information.

Childhood worse in US and UK

According to a UNICEF report that ranked 21 developed nations in six categories that included health, education, relationships, behaviors and risks, material well-being and young people’s own sense of happiness, the U.S. and U.K. came up dead last overall, respectively 20th and 21st. Not surprisingly, the countries that ranked as the best places to be a child included the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark (these Nordic states frequently top this and similar rankings). What was perhaps the most surprising outcome of this survey was that children living in the most developed and best-off countries weren’t necessarily the best-off in terms of their own well-being. Some have tried to explain these findings by suggesting that these wealthier nations’ lower rankings were the result of less spending on social programs and intense competition in the job market that led to adults spending less time with their children.

It would be interesting to compare the long-hours culture in the US and the UK and its development over the years with the impact this is having on our children.

The highest individual ranking achieved by the U.S. was in education, where it placed 12th, though it ranked worse than most other countries for reading, mathematics and scientific literacy. Even worse, it placed second to last for the percent of 15- to 19-year-olds in full or part-time education. As The Economist succinctly explained it in its latest issue, Britain came up short in the rankings due to three primary factors: “sex, booze and horrid friends.” British children were least likely to trust their peers (just 43 percent were willing to describe them as “kind and helpful”) although, ironically, they were the most likely to have engaged in sex with them by the age of 15 (38 percent). Furthermore, they were also more likely to get drunk and the third-biggest consumers of marijuana.

While there hasn’t been too much fuss made in the U.S. over this report, British opposition politicians, including Conservative leader and prime ministerial hopeful David Cameron, were quick to criticize the Tony Blair-led Labor government for the country’s shortcomings. In the wake of this report and the recent string of killings of teenage boys in South London, Cameron tried to capitalize on the furor by strongly promulgating his view that family life is more important than the creation of material wealth. Though his appeal was certainly plausible, his set of policies to address this crisis, including a crackdown on fathers negligent in their duties to care for their children and financial inducements to encourage marriage, seemed rushed and impractical.

In the U.S., this unremarkable performance will only help to provide more ammunition to those who have long clamored for a massive overhaul of our current Health Management Organization (HMO)-centered private health care system in favor of a single-payer, single-product model such as the one successfully applied by our Canadian neighbors. As Daniel McFadden, a professor of economics and the director of the Econometrics Laboratory at Berkeley, explained in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the U.S. needs to focus on implementing three substantial reforms to fix our looming health care crisis: wring out the underlying inefficiencies in our system that contribute to over 30 percent of health care costs; bring universal health insurance coverage with a special emphasis on preventive medicine to keep the high cost of expensive procedures down; and promote incentives that match choice of expensive treatments with consumers’ willingness to pay for them. Similar plans proposed by Robert H. Frank of the Johnson School of Cornell University and his colleagues would greatly help to alleviate the extremely high per capita fee we pay each year on health care, around $6,102 (compare that to the amount Canadians pay, roughly $3,165), and, by focusing on more cost-efficient preventive measures, allow us to create a system that would cover all Americans. The continual graying of our population and the tendency for older individuals to live longer than before makes it especially necessary that we urgently deal with this looming crisis -- health care costs are projected to rise to 40 percent as a proportion of the GDP by 2050.

Although the UNICEF report is open to criticism, mostly due to the fact that much of the data used dates back to 2000 and that measures such as affluence were assessed in relative terms, it is certainly not, as the Times of London harshly characterized it, “unalloyed, ideological nonsense.” The future of our nation depends on the well-being and achievements of our children. How does this make you feel when you look at your children today. Let's move to Holland!

Chinese New Year

Tomorrow is the beginning of the Year of the Pig. Find out where the nearest celebration is to you. If you live in Birmingham, the Arcadian Centre will be holding the annual chinese new year celebrations with dragon dancers, traditional chinese dancers. The kids will love buying paper dragons and of course you can enjoy the wonderful chinese food of the area.

Chinese New Year is a tradition stretching back centuries and to Chinese communities at home and abroad it’s as important a celebration as Christmas in Europe or Thanksgiving in America with as much thought and preparation going in to the event and just as many superstitions and traditions involved.Preparations for the New Year begin a month in advance with presents bought, decorations hung and houses cleaned from top to bottom to sweep away bad luck while, in China, doors and windows are given a fresh coat of paint. The festivities really begin however on New Year’s Eve with the whole family, donning their finest red garb (the Chinese symbol of good luck) coming together for a feast of seafood, dumplings and seaweed, with each dish representing good luck, fortune and longevity. Following dinner fireworks are lit to welcome in the New Year at midnight, this symbolises the sending away of the old year.On New Year’s Day the tradition of Hong Bao commences with red packets of money given to children and unmarried adults before people take to the streets to greet their neighbours. The end of the celebrations are marked by the Festival of Lanterns, the singing and dancing street festivities that we recognise in the West as the usual Chinese New Year event.Throughout the UK Chinese New Year is celebrated with fabulous street parties complete with dancing ladies, music and the infamous dragon. The most well known of these celebrations takes place in London’s Chinatown, an event which draws in thousands of onlookers every year.2007 Year of the Pig
According to the Chinese, 2007 is Year of the Pig, beginning on February 18, 2007 and ending on February 6, 2008. To me this sounds like a great deal, pigs are highly intelligent and resourceful, plus they get to wallow about all day eating – what more could you ask for?
Due to the inherent nature of the Pig, you can expect 2007 to be a year filled with entertainment, fun and joy. The Pig is a very good-natured individual and makes a wonderful friend. They are a bundle of fun to be around and are always honest and caring, compassionate and peaceful individuals.

2007 specifically is the year of the Fire Pig and as such anyone who is born this year can be sure be to active, outgoing and extroverted, breathing life into everything they associate themselves with.

What’s Your Sign?

According to legend Buddha called twelve animals to him before he left earth, those twelve now rule over their relative years and lend their characteristics to those born under them…so are you a slippery snake or a cuddly rabbit?Rat: 1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008

Rats are charming and generous but can be snappy and critical.Famous Rats: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Prince Harry

Ox: 1925, 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997, 2009Born leaders, Oxen are strong and reliable.Famous Oxen: Kate Beckinsale, George Clooney, Keira Knightley

Tiger:1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010Tigers are said to be strong adventurous as well as being real risk takers.Famous Tigers: Charlotte Church, Robbie Williams, Kate Moss

Rabbit: 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011Although affectionate and friendly Rabbits can be a bit vain.Famous Rabbits: Jamie Oliver, David Beckham, Brad Pitt

Dragon: 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1989, 2000Fun loving and popular, Dragons are the life and soul of the party.Famous Dragons: Teri Hatcher, Elle MacPherson, John Lennon

Snake: 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1990, 2001Although sometimes selfish, Snakes are romantic and wise.Famous Snakes: Orlando Bloom, Sarah Jessica Parker, Liv TylerHorse: 1930, 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1991, 2002

Horses are hardworking and intelligent but look out for that self absorbed streak!Famous Horses: Jordan, Katie Holmes, Kanye West

Sheep: 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1992, 2003Sheep are said to be artistic and charming but can’t resist a good moan.Famous Sheep: Jodie Marsh, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts

Monkey: 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1993, 2004Lucky Monkeys are intelligent and loved by all.Famous Monkeys: Kylie Minogue, Jessica Simpson, Jake Gyllenhall

Rooster:1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1994, 2005The most hard working of all the animals, Roosters can come across as bossy.Famous Roosters: Sienna Miller, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton

Dog: 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1995, 2006Faithful is any Dog’s middle name but they can sometimes worry too much.Famous Dogs: Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Kirsten Dunst

Pig/Boar: 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1996, 2007Born entertainers, Boars are tolerant of all and make great friends.Famous Boars: Elton John, Ewan McGregor, Kate Bosworth

Happy New Year.