Zonta Hervey Bay IWD Breakfast a smashing success!

What an absolute fantastic turnout for the Zonta Club of Hervey Bay’s International Women’s Day Breakfast at the Boat Club on Friday, March 7th!

The breakfast featured a truly inspirational guest speaker in Kathleen Noonan, journalist and columnist of the Courier Mail. 160 guests thoroughly enjoyed the morning talk which touched on lighthearted topics from Kathleen’s experience of growing up with an “early feminist father” and her exciting career as a journalist which took her to as far as South Africa and the UK.  A strong advocate of women’s issues, Kathleen also talked about Second Chance , an independent not-for-profit organisation with an unswerving commitment to solving female homelessness. The organisation’s primary goal is to take women off the streets and to help them take control of their lives.

This year’s International Women’s Day celebration is centered on the theme “Ending Poverty for Women and Girls through Economic Empowerment.”

Zonta Hervey Bay also honored Ms. Ruth White with the Quiet Achiever Award for her selfless dedication to our community. A retired business owner, Ruth is a member of the Hervey Bay Lioness Club as well as an interior decorating instructor at the Maryborough TAFE. In the 1980’s she became a brownie leader for a few years before getting involved and forming the Hervey Bay Athletic Club which still operates today and has its own grounds at Dundowran, a project both she & her husband still support. In 2012 after hearing the plight of a young local girl Paiten Hunter who has the extremely rare disease called Proteus Syndrome, Ruth decided to raise some much needed funds to assist her. Over $2200 were raised, to which Zonta Club of Hervey Bay also contributed, for a wheelchair and to modify the mother’s van to fit the wheelchair. Ruth also started a campaign to buy Paiten a special mattress and send her to a Proteus clinic in the UK, one of only two known clinics in the world.

  •  IWD 2014 speaker Kathleen Noonan with Zonta Hervey Bay President Jenny Ferris

Quiet Achiever Awardee Ruth White
Some of the 160 guests at the IWD 2014 Breakfast and guest speaker, Kathleen Noonan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Zonta Club of Hervey Bay main page.