The award ceremony you’ve all been waiting for! If you weren’t able to be part of the the live Empower Women in Shared Mobility 2021 award ceremony on Thursday January 28th, this is your chance to watch the event recording and to learn more about the origins of the EmpowerWISM award, our female finalists and discover who the winner is – in case you don’t already know!
We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank all our partners for their support throughout this entire process, including all our judges, UITP, ABB, ITS America, GoWithFlow, Stanford University, our media partner, Intelligent Mobility Xperience and award ceremony MC, Melika Jahangiri from Wunder Mobility. We’d also like to thank every entrepreneur and company that applied to the program and the of course, the movmi team for working tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure the program was a success.
Keep reading to learn more about the origin of the award, our female finalists, a fireside chat with Jessica Robinson & Candice Xie and of course, who the winner is!
Empower Women in Mobility 2021: VIRTUAL Award Ceremony
THE FINALISTS
BYKKO is a Newcastle-headquartered company with a distinctively European-systems approach to electric bike fleet management. They are the first Australian enterprise specialised in research, development and implementation of intelligent bike sharing and personal mobility, managed with data.
GeoTwin is a platform helps public and private authorities to efficiently model city-scale decision making enablers. They integrate all modes of transport (current and future) within a single transport planning tool, providing credible results to support your investment & regulation decisions.
ChargerHelp! are building an app to enable on-demand repair of electric vehicle charging stations. They are passionate about keeping all networked EV charging stations online and workforce development.
Why & what is EmpowerWiSM?
Shared mobility is at the intersection of information tech and engineering and less than a third of this global shared mobility workforce is female. If you narrow it down to transport, there is only 22% and on an executive level, it’s a mere 3%.
SANDRA PHILLIPS
Sandra used to work for Car2Go and was responsible for launching the services in the Canadian market. After 4 years she decided to start movmi. When she was having goodbye drinks with her colleagues, then mentioned how they will miss seeing a woman at the executive level – it was only then that she realized the unequal gender balance in the the industry.
Fast forward 6 years and movmi has conducted over 100 interviews with female leaders in the space to amplify their voices and expertise. Sandra has been involved in more that 60 projects worldwide and most of the systems still favour men. She decided it was time to take it to the next level. She teamed up with other likeminded individuals and created the EmpowerWISM 2021 Award to showcase female entrepreneurs, to boost and celebrate their efforts during 2021 with a bigger network and a 12 month mentoring package with movmi.
A Moment of Lift…
“As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth: Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone. Women’s rights and society’s health and wealth rise together.”
– The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
how were the empowerwism applicants assessed?
Our judges for this award, who spent months deliberating the top finalists and eventually the winner, were:
- Rupa Nandy, Head of UITP (International Association of Public Transport) India
- Jessica Alba, Transportation Planning, Policy & Strategy at Stanford University
- Sandra Phillips, Shared Mobility Architect, Founder and CEO, movmi
- Amy Ford, Transportation and Advanced Mobility Leader at ITS America
- Jane Hoffer, CEO at GoWithFlow and
- Stephanie Medeiros, Global Account Executive at ABB
VENKATESH GOPAL
We received 14 applications for the award, each with a completely diverse background that included technology, mobility operators, consulting, EV operators, training and even women’s self-defense! As a company, movmi are involved with so many different streams of shared mobility, but during this process we reliased there are so many more that we need to be interacting with.
From November to January, we screened the applicants, assessed their companies and conducted interviews. To say it was challenging, comparing such unique and diverse companies, would be an understatement. We looked at their strengths, what the need is for their niche, is their idea scalable etc. but were blown away by the passion and drive we saw during the personal interviews we conducted with each company.
FIRESIDE CHAT: ASSEMBLY VENTURES & VEO
JESSICA ROBINSON & CANDICE XIE
During the ceremony, we had the pleasure of hosting a fireside chat with Jessica Robinson, Co-Founder and Partner of Assembly Ventures and Candice Xie the Co-Founder and CEO of Veo.
Veo was the one EmpowerWISM applicant that really stood out about the rest. Veo’s mission is to establish micromobility as a true transportation system to reduce automotive use and promote widespread utilization of shared alternative mobility in a safe and reliable way, while and delivering successful innovative and sustainable programs. CEO and Co-Founder Candice has a background as a financial analyst and has utilized this in helping to create and operate Veo, along with her Co-Founder’s background in engineering. There was a gap in the US and they thought they could bridge it. Two months after they created the company, they were working at it as a full time job in a university incubator.
We decided that Candice and her company Veo deserved special recognition for their incredible work in micromobility, which we will dive into on a deeper level during a future blog post – so stay tuned!
the empowerwism winners
1st Place: ChargerHelp!
Kameale Terry, Co-Founder & CEO
Kameale is the Co-Founder and CEO of ChargerHelp! Inc. an app that enables on-demand repair of electric vehicle charging stations. As the former Director of Programs at EV Connect, an electric vehicle charge station network provider, Kameale structured and led teams to execute electric vehicle infrastructure projects and programs in the United States, Australia, and Canada for commercial and government entities. Her most notable projects include the Electrify America – Phase One Program, the Southern California Edison Charge Ready Pilot, and the New York Power Authority portfolio.
2nd Place: BYKKO
Monica Zarafu, Founder & Managing Director
Over 20 years of academic, local government and industry practice, Monica is an expert in innovative transport solutions. Leveraging her background in transport engineering and research in the built environment, Monica has managed a number of projects in the field of personal and shared mobility, working with governments and transport agencies, including Newcastle City Council and Transport for NSW. Her research of autonomous mass transit systems has taken her all over Australia and the world, presenting at prestigious forums and international conferences in Sydney, Geelong and Silicon Valley.
Recently however, Monica has adjusted her focus closer to home. By utilising the ‘Making Your Place’ grant and recognizing the rapid growth world-wide in bike sharing and Newcastle City’s greater cycling access, she and her partner launched BYKKO.
3rd Place: GEOTWIN
Göknur Sirin-Jubin, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Göknur has a computer science background with a PHD in complex system science. She is the Co-Founder of GeoTwin, a Human-Centred Global Intelligence Platform’ where data, AI and activity and agent-based stimulation is combined to build intelligent products & services to improve people’s lives. The platform is fully cloud-based and proposes a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) framework.
final thoughts
This is just the beginning for our Empower Women in Shared Mobility program. ChargerHelp! will receive 12 months of mentoring as well as access to movmi’s (and our partners) professional network, so stay tuned for updates on our social media channels. We have no doubt we will see ChargerHelp! and all our other applicants and finalists, flourish and succeed in 2021. We are delighted to have met so many dedicated and inspiring women throughout this entire process and hope that we will all use the new connections we have made to lift each other up in the future.
If you liked the EmpowerWISM Award program make sure you check out the Carshare City Awards 2020 here.
