Blanca Vergara – empowering women

Dressed smartly in a white jacket, floral patterned skirt and hazardously high-heeled shocking pink shoes, Blanca Vergara looks surprisingly at ease on a grey beanbag.

You wouldn’t expect to find her here just above sustainable bamboo floor level in this T-shirt-and-blue-jeans space for social entrepreneurs in Westerstraat, Amsterdam.

Yet the laidback Hub fits with her new millennium brand of women’s liberation. “This place reminds me that some men do get it: there’s more to life than competition and climbing up the hierarchy. Hierarchy and rank don’t feature here,” says Blanca.

Empowering women and liberating them from the ill-conceived desire to be like men in order to fit into ‘the system’ is what Blanca is all about. Describing herself as a ‘Wonder Woman Maker’, she helps organisations to unleash the power of their women, and coaches women professionals to find their passion and realise their own true potential.

“As women, we’re trained to see the things we’re bad at. I want to help women realise what it is that they’re fantastic at,” she says.

Women work wonders
A member of The Hub since January 2009, she holds coaching sessions with clients in the Hub’s studio room. Women need to recognise the unique qualities they have to create success through collaboration, she says. There’s never been a better time to do it than now – with the current economic crisis showing that the old system doesn’t work. ‘Women Work Wonders’ is her belief, as well as the title of her newly published ‘transformational manual for 21st century women’, available free at www.blancavergara.com.

Born in Mexico City, the “youngest and smallest” in a family of Aztec, Spanish, English origin, her mother was a poet, her father an engineer. Blanca learned early to speak up and to bridge different worlds. She took an engineering degree and made a career in IT, rising up the ranks in the corporate world until, feeling “like a Ferrari carrying cement”, she stepped out to set up her own business.

Her dreams: to do more writing, coaching and public speaking  – all of it designed to “wake up more women”. For relaxation, she turns to poetry and painting – often depicting trees, another of her great loves in life. She’s also an avid video fan, regularly posting on YouTube.