The Regional Meeting of SI London Chilterns took place in St Albans on Saturday 20th June when several members of SI Slough attended.
Forced Marriage was the topic for the morning – with keynote speaker Aneeta Prem, founder of the Freedom Charity www.freedomcharity.org.uk The charity works to empower young people to feel they have the tools, confidence and support around the issues of family relationships which can lead to early and forced marriage and dishonour based violence. Aneeta has been on national TV recently covering these important human rights issues.
Women and Engineering was the topic for the afternoon – Vanessa Diaz, Women’s Engineering Society(WES) Council member and an Engineer working in Medical Research 
gave us a fascinating and highly energetic insight to her work – she is like a human dynamo! It is National Women in Engineering Day on 23 Junewww.wes.org.uk/nwed – 
Vanessa talked about the shockingly few women engineers we have in the UK (8.7% of engineers are women which is the lowest in the world). WES (based in Stevenage) works to promote women in engineering including outreach with schools to encouraging more girls to take up exciting careers in Engineering. Jackie Paling, a Chemical Engineer and another inspirational Soroptimist was also at the meeting. Jackie has been a member of WES for 40 years and gave a brilliant vote of thanks to Vanessa which included telling us about some of her own challenges in overcoming barriers to become an engineer in the first place. Jackie has been ill recently and she challenged herself again to be with us – saying “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world” – and we wouldn’t have wanted to miss having Jackie with us either! In the picture above L to R are Jackie Paling, Rita Beaumont and Pauline Panter (joint Regional Presidents) and Vanessa Diaz.