PowHERful Conversations Puts Reinvention and Returner Talent in the Same Room

The Greater Valley Chamber's WIN Council is bringing reinvention into the business conversation today, and Untapped Potential founder Candace Freedenberg is helping make the topic concrete.

The sixth annual PowHERful Conversations breakfast is scheduled for Tuesday, 6 October, at 8:00 a.m. Its theme is the power of reinvention, with the Women In Networking Council gathering women business owners, community leaders, professionals, mentors, candidates and allies for a morning built around lived experience and practical connection.

Freedenberg's participation gives the event a sharper business angle. Untapped Potential works with women returning to professional life after career breaks, especially caregiving-related pauses. The organisation's own framing is that reinvention is not a side note but part of the returner journey. That matters because career gaps are too often treated as an absence on a resume rather than as a period in which judgement, resilience, problem-solving and leadership may have deepened.

The panel is set to be moderated by Sherry Konwerski, a Women’s Business Development Council leader and owner of Bonus Business Services. Her role connects the morning to small-business support as well as personal reinvention. The event is not only about telling brave stories. It is about giving women practical ways to see a next step, whether that step is returning to work, starting again, building a business or re-entering a professional network.

Local context matters here. The Greater Valley Chamber serves a business community where relationships, referrals and confidence can shape opportunity. A returner who has been out of the workforce may have skills and readiness, but still need a room where introductions feel possible again. A business owner who has changed direction may need peers who understand that the new chapter is not less legitimate than the old one.

Freedenberg's own story makes that visible. She moved from engineering careers in corporate America to stay-at-home motherhood and then into entrepreneurship. That arc is not unusual, but it is still often undercounted in economic-development conversations. When experienced women are treated as missing from the talent pool, the community loses capacity it already helped create.

For SheMeansNews readers, the useful signal is that reinvention is being treated as infrastructure, not inspiration. Mentors, candidates, business owners and civic leaders in the same room can make the returner path less private and less fragile.

If the breakfast succeeds, the strongest outcome will not be a polished quote about courage. It will be women leaving with a contact, a clearer story, a practical next step and a business community more willing to recognise talent that took a non-linear route.