Emmy award-winning chef, Ivey inaugural co-chair among headliners for Alabama Women’s Summit

Lean On: Alabama is set to host its inaugural Alabama Women’s Summit on Friday, with a star-studded lineup of featured speakers on the agenda.

The summit, to be held at the Bryant Conference Center in Tuscaloosa, will focus on the organization’s core values of wisdom, hope, faith and friendship through not only inspirational speakers, but workshops and interpersonal engagement, too.

Lean On: Alabama is inviting women from across the state for the day crafted around how they can better work together for themselves, their organizations, their communities and the Yellowhammer State as a whole.

“I could not be more excited about the Lean On: Alabama Women’s Summit, because it is going to be an opportunity for women from across the state to come together for a day filled with wisdom, hope, faith, and friendship,” Dr. Mary Lee Caldwell, president and co-founder of the organization, said in a statement. “I believe the most powerful resource we have is the relationships that we form, and throughout the day we are going to encouraging women to connect, to collaborate, and to invest in one another.”

The summit will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and will include lunch and a snack. Tickets for the event are $50 for an all-day pass, with student tickets available for $40.

Over the course of the day, Dr. Cathy Randall will speak on wisdom, Kimberly Caudle Lewis on hope, Kim King on sharing her faith and Caldwell on friendship.

Randall served as co-chair of Governor Kay Ivey’s inaugural committee. She was recently featured on Yellowhammer Multimedia’s 2018 Power & Influence List, as well as being honored as a Yellowhammer Woman of Impact last spring.

Lewis is the CEO of PROJECTXYZ and the current chair of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce.

King served as an attorney and executive in the law department of Exxon Mobil Corporation for over thirty years prior to leaving to pursue speaking and writing. She currently works with several nonprofit and faith-based initiatives across the nation and is the author of “When Women Give: The Adventure of a Generous Life.”

In addition to the exciting speakers throughout the day, chef Carla Hall, the former co-host of ABC’s Emmy award-winning “The Chew,” will deliver the closing keynote at 5:30 p.m. Friday. For those unable to attend the entire summit, reserved seating tickets for the keynote address are $10 for the general public and $5 for students.

Thanks to generous sponsors, including Mercedes-Benz, Protective Life, Regions Bank and the University of Alabama Panhellenic Association, general admission seating to just Hall’s speech is available for free. General admission will be first come, first served.

Lean On: Alabama is a non-partisan, non-profit organization seeking to bring together women of all ages through a statewide platform meant to promote both personal and community development.

Event organizers request that everyone register for the event ahead of time, including general admission seating seekers. You can register here.

Sean Ross is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn