YPO member Desiree Bombenon manages to cram more into a year than most people fit into a lifetime. As CEO and President of Canada’s SureCall, she runs one of the most respected and awarded call center operations in the world. As an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow at Harvard, she’s spent 2017 researching the best way to educate women in under-served and developing regions of the world. As a wine and spirits importer, she brings delicious brews and blends from France and Israel to the Canadian market. Then there’s the directorship of Canada’s National Music Centre and her mentoring program — not to mention the two novels she’s somehow managed to publish in what must be a vanishingly small amount of spare time.
Gender parity and female empowerment are not just moral imperatives for Bombenon, but also business opportunities. “As noted in studies by the World Economic Forum, the Mackenzie Global Report on Gender Equality and the International Center for Research on Women, the potential economic value created by enhancing the role of women in the workforce could boost GDP between five and 20 percent in most countries,” she says.
Bombenon doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. As part of her work at Harvard, she has created a project, “Hero Girls,” designed to target the root causes of gender inequality across the globe: she’s currently in discussions with WE Charity about deploying a pilot scheme in 2019, and with UNICEF about their UNdaunted program which aims to change the lives of one million girls plus their families, communities and countries in sub-Saharan Africa. You can’t help feeling that Mrs. Black would be proud.