CHICAGO – Women in HVACR (WHVACR) held a Meet & Greet event for members and friends Tuesday night during the AHR Expo. The event was held at Margaritaville at Navy Pier.

“This is really a major event where we have a lot of suppliers, manufacturers, wholesalers, and educators – everybody comes here,” said Mary Jo Gentry, president, WHVACR, and marketing communications manager, Yellow Jacket. “It’s a great place to really recruit any woman from the field who wants to be part of the organizations.

“AHR kicks off the year,” she continued. “We met as a board before the show started. Our main initiative this year is to bring more of the membership into a board level in terms of helping us co-chair different committees. We have 10 different committees now, and there’s one board member that chairs all of those committees. Our goal this year is for each of those chair-people to reach out to the members and get them actively involved from a membership standpoint.”

The organization is most excited about planning for its second annual standalone conference, the location is yet to be determined.

“We surveyed membership to see where they wanted to go,” Gentry said. “We’re looking at some southeastern locations. But of course, we want to spread this around regionally so that everybody has an opportunity to attend if they can’t travel. We increased budget for keynote speaker, and, more importantly, we increased the amount of scholarships we’re giving from three to four. We hope to continue to give back as much as possible.”

For more information, visit www.womeninhvacr.org.

Publication date: 1/24/2018

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