Hi, I’m Allison Venditti and this is the Moms at Work podcast. I’ve been an HR professional and a career coach for over a decade and our team has helped thousands of women grow their career. So whether you’re burnt out, underpaid, or just plain fed up, this podcast is here to fuel your fire, connect you to our movement, and help you take your career to the next level. 

Welcome to the very first episode of the Moms at Work podcast. I’m your host, Allison Venditti. I’m an HR expert, career coach, and according to the Globe and Mail, changemaker.

I’m also a Star Wars nerd and the Founder of Moms at Work, which is Canada’s largest professional network for working moms. So Moms at Work isn’t your traditional women’s group, and that’s on purpose. There’s no corporate sponsors calling shots, and there’s definitely no girl boss tote bags. What we offer is real connection with other working moms who get it. So we’re not here to slap a motivational quote on your coffee mug and call it empowerment. We’re here for so much more. We actually give you the tools and offer everything you need from free resources to career coaching to help you advance in your career, but also for you to push back on the systems that weren’t built with you in mind. 

This is about community. This is about meaningful connections. And yeah, this is about change making. Moms at Work has a lot to offer. So buckle up, because we’re just getting started! Let’s start at the beginning. People ask me all the time, why did you start Moms at Work? And the truth is, because it didn’t exist. If we lived in an equitable functioning society, Moms at Work wouldn’t need to exist.

And honestly, when people ask me what my goal is with Moms at Work, my goal is to work myself out of a job. Moms at Work shouldn’t have to be here. But right now, that’s not the case, so here we are. Right now, mothers all over the world are still fighting for basic human rights in the workplace, in policy, in society, and that doesn’t change in Canada. I’ve spent over 15 years in corporate HR and recruitment working with major companies across healthcare, finance, tech, forestry, governments, you name it, I’ve done it.

I built programs, shaped policies and best practices, and I’ve increased employee retention. But during all of that time, I also became a mom. And then I survived a traumatic brain injury and that completely changed my life. Before my brain injury though, being a working mom almost broke me. And I spent years fighting to try and fit into a space that wasn’t made for me to succeed. I thought for the longest time that there was something wrong with me. And looking back, there wasn’t. I just realized I was trying to fit into a system. Trying to network, trying to go to events, trying to find opportunities that weren’t accessible to me or built for people like me. 

Then I stopped waiting for someone else to fix it and I stopped trying to fit into it. So I started Moms at Work. I built this community because it didn’t exist. When Moms at Work started, we were a tiny Facebook group. Then the pandemic hit and we grew into a Facebook group of almost 25,000 people. Now we have almost 100,000 followers across our platform. They follow us because they trust us.

They look to us for making changes for working moms across Canada. And from that came the Collective. The Collective is an exclusive and intentionally intimate network. It’s for professional working moms in mid to senior level careers, and we help each other. We’re building our own version of that old boys club everybody always talked about. Inside the Collective, members get access to a pretty large network of other women, expert led resources, tools, workshops designed for you by me.

The other thing you get in the Collective is ME, all the time. I spend way too much time in the Collective. I’m personally involved in helping you with all of your issues and it’s my favorite place to be. But Moms at Work also exists for another reason. We exist to bring you the information you need to navigate the system that wasn’t built with us in mind. We have built free resources no one else has, including the first and only maternity and paternity leave top-up list in Canada, free comprehensive maternity program, which means that we teach you your rights, and your employer’s rights during maternity leave. It’s been now downloaded by over 5,000 women. We’re here to help you understand what you can and can’t do on maternity leave, how to navigate EI, what your legal rights are, and everything in between. It’s one thing that I’m really, really proud of. What started as a really small Facebook group during the pandemic then ballooned to 25,000 people. We were one of the only groups during the pandemic that was fighting for working mothers. We met with the Prime Minister.

We met with government officials. We helped with the rollout of CERB and the childcare benefit. During the pandemic, Moms at Work became the voice for working mothers in Canada, and I couldn’t be more proud of the things that we accomplished. But from that came something I love even more, and that thing IS the Collective. So when I looked around, I saw that all of these women that were in our free groups and they lacked the professional networks that I had seen in areas like tech and consulting.

These are places where everybody got jobs because they knew someone and that thing didn’t exist for working mothers. So I built it. It’s an intentionally small and intimate network and we cap the number of people so that you can get comfortable and get to know each other. I want working mothers to have a professional network that makes other people jealous. The Collective is for mid and senior level women with the goal of helping you grow your network and build your career. Inside that space, you get so many more things from meaningful networking experiences. 

I know it sounds fake, but it’s real. Expert led resources, tools, workshops, and I’m in there all the time. I’m here to help you support you and help you grow your career. And sometimes you just need like a friendly ear. And sometimes you need some tough love and I’m there to provide it all. But more than the Collective, Moms at Work is this to fight for you, to bring you information and help you navigate a system that wasn’t built with you in mind.

We built free resources that no one else has, including the first and only maternity and paternity leave top-up list in Canada. That’s right, companies for some reason didn’t want you to know what they were offering for paternity and maternity leave. So we went out and found it. So far we have over 500 companies listed, which is not a bad start. We also developed a program called My Parental Leave. It is completely free and for all women across Canada to help you navigate EI, maternity leave, and understand your rights at work, whether it be…breastfeeding, accommodation, or return to work, we’ve covered it all. And we’ve made it free, because systems don’t change unless they change for everyone. And finally, we have a career community that supports mentors and most importantly, mobilizes women. I don’t want you to change, I want the system to change. Right from the beginning, Moms at Work made a big choice. We do not allow any sponsorships or government grants. The one thing that companies love to do is sell to moms.

Moms control 80 % of household spending. We pick the cars, we pick where we live, we pick where we shop, we pick what food to buy, and companies want to sell to us. Moms at Work has said no. When we do that, we can’t criticize them. And we spend a lot of time criticizing companies that are hurting working mothers, everyone from Google to Loblaws and everything in between. And we can’t do that if we’re also taking their money. Moms at Work is funded solely by our members, people who join our collective and believe in us and our mission and the change that we’re building together. So when you join Moms at Work, I’m not gonna not say things because we’re getting money from Galen Weston. We’re gonna say the things that we need to say because we represent you, and that will never change. So here’s the thing, we’re really doing two things at once. So on the one hand, we’re helping women navigate the career system as it is. So we help you negotiate your salary, how to return to work after parental leave, how to pivot mid-career. 

We’re giving you tools and ideas and support to help you survive and thrive in a workplace that really wasn’t designed for us. But on the other hand, we’re here to change the system itself, because the goal should not just be to survive this system, it should be to transform it. So we’ve pushed for and helped deliver pay transparency legislation. We were part of the movement that made $10 a day childcare a reality. And we built a free parental leave program to bridge the gap between congrats, you’re pregnant and welcome back to work because it’s pretty opaque as to what’s happening in between there when it comes to work. So that’s not career coaching, that’s structural change. So right now we’re fighting for EI reform. We’re calling out systemic inequities and we’re bringing forward cold, hard facts to politicians, to policymakers, because they’re the ones who are making decisions about our lives and I think we should be involved. We actually conducted Canada’s first and only survey on maternity leave experience. And we proved that

15 % of women are terminated or laid off while on maternity leave every year. That is the size of a small town in Canada. And I want to let you sit with that. That’s not a stat. That’s a woman losing her job because she decided to have a kid. That’s a career that’s completely derailed because someone somewhere decided that motherhood made her expendable. And that frankly, is messed up. So some people say this.

Well, that’s just how it is. She chose to have a family or you can have it all or this is my favorite. Someone actually said this to me. It’s like women just need to lean in harder. And I hate Sheryl Sandberg for writing that book every single day. You don’t need to lean in harder. You don’t have to. That’s not true. The system needs to stop pushing us out. So what do we need? We need more paid leave. We need EI speed reform.

We need to understand what flexible work really is and get it implemented. We need access to affordable childcare and we need to stop punishing women for deciding to become mothers, period. So now we need to stop pretending like asking for equal pay or work flexibility or a chance to lead is somehow asking for too much because it’s not. It’s not, it’s the bare minimum.

When you work with us, so whether that’s career coaching, joining our collective, taking our courses, or yeah, listening and sharing our podcast, you’re not just investing in yourself, you’re investing in a system we all want to see. Because I actually believe that we can shape these systems better together. Women are entering more leadership positions, they’re graduating university at higher rates, they’re taking over entire industries. But let’s be real, right? Political road ahead looks rough. It is rough.

and women’s rights are under attack around the world and Canada is not immune. And we, moms, we’re on the front lines, in your workplace, communities, in our homes. We are the policy experts, the time managers, the caretakers, the breadwinners. We’re tired, but we’re also smart, fierce, and really fed up with waiting. So I think this is an excellent mix for change over the next few years. The thing is, at Moms at Work, we’re building way more than careers. We’re empowering you to own your worth.

And we talk about money a lot because we were taught not to talk about it. All that does is hurt women. So if you’re listening and you’re thinking, wow, I do, I want more, I want more support, I want to be differently, or I want to be a part of this, then you’re in the right place. So however you decide to get involved with Moms at Work, I want you to know that there’s a place for you. So whether you’re just following our work, joining our collective, or just sharing our social media posts,

There is a place in Moms at Work for you. And I want to tell you this, you’re not too late. You’re not too loud. You’re not too ambitious. You’re exactly who we’re building this for. So I want to say this and I want you to listen. Welcome to Moms at Work. You belong here with us. All right, if you’ve made it this far and you’re still listening and you’re serious about taking your career to the next level, I want to tell you a few of the things that we’re doing in the collective because

Moms at Work believes in two things, accessibility and getting paid. And yes, we’re a business. And yes, we believe that women deserve to be paid for their work, including us. But we also know that not everybody is in a place where they can afford to invest in a program or maybe now’s not the right time for you. Whatever your reason, that shouldn’t stop you from getting support. And so that’s why our free resources are so important. Prior to leave, interview tips, returning to work, pay transparency, you name it.

we’ve made a ton of free resources that are in the show notes for you to explore because Moms at Work is for everybody. So download our blog posts, mini courses, whatever you want, because no matter where you’re starting from, you deserve access to the tools that are gonna help you move forward. Now, if you wanna level up or you’re a working mom listening to this and you’re like, I am feeling stuck, I am feeling underpaid, or heck, you’re just straight up exhausted trying to do all of the things.

I want to introduce you to something that will actually change the game. And that thing is the collective. And I built the collective because it didn’t exist. And this is coming from a woman who must have joined every women’s group under the sun. I joined tech bro groups, consulting firms, you name it. I tried every sort of networking. I consider myself a networking guinea pig for you. The collective though is exclusive. It’s premium and paid program, but it’s not your average networking group.

It is a powerful no BS community built by moms for moms, and it’s here to help you move your career forward. The women who joined the collective have negotiated four day work weeks for themselves. They’ve started their own companies. They’ve increased their salaries. They’ve landed jobs without applying solely through the connections that they’re making through the collective. 70 % of jobs are never posted publicly. They’re all done through networking.

And for the longest time, those experiences, those jobs were totally out of reach for people who didn’t have time to network. So my job was to flip the script and be like, how can we network with ourselves to get those opportunities? And listen, I know you’ve joined the networking groups before, and it felt like a complete waste of time. I have been there. I’ve been a part of them. Someone made me put stickers on my coffee cup about the things that I wanted to talk about. I threw the coffee cup out and left. This is why we’re building it different.

There is no hustle culture. There is no competition. There’s no weird vibes. This is just a network of really smart women who get it and want to be supportive of other people. So when I tell people about The Collective, I’m like, you have to want to be a part of something more. You have to show up for people and have them show up in return. And when that happens, that is magical. So our meetups, our career advice, coffee chats, coaching, all of it is designed with you in mind.

I never found that. I never felt like women’s groups were talking to me. We’ve got resume workshops, we help work our LinkedIn magic, we have salary negotiation classes, and actual women in almost every industry who are ready to open doors and say, come on in. But what do you actually get when you join there? You actually get one full year of the community. It’s moderated by me and our team of experts. The term that’s been thrown around in the Collective is one of my new favorite terms, and that’s feminist nepotism. It’s women helping other women get jobs in a way that I’ve never seen before. But in addition to that, we teach things differently than everybody else that I’ve seen. I teach salary negotiation differently, and we’re going to have an entire episode on that because I’m a person who has negotiated over 1,000 contracts on the employer side. I know exactly what they’re looking at. I know exactly what they’re doing, and I know exactly what to ask for. 

So listen. I know this is going to sound harsh, but you do not need another LinkedIn course. You do not need a second degree and you do not need to work harder. What you need is a community that gets you, a community that lifts you up and a community that’s willing to open doors for opportunities that are never posted on the internet. That’s The Collective. So then my question to you is, are you in? If you believe in what we’re doing, I want you to share this episode or you can sign up for our newsletter or you can follow us on socials or join the wait list for The Collective.

Because change doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people like you demand it. So all that being said, thanks for joining me for this first episode of Moms at Work. I’m Allison Venditti, reminding you that you’re doing a good job.