Mother Entrepreneurs

A feature devoted to the 'Work at Home Mums Romania' Association (WAHM)

România Internațional, 15.01.2019, 13:41

Many
women are mothers and they are grateful for that every day. More than anything
else they want to be by their children’s side and of course to be self-reliant.
Florentina Baloş is a project coordinator within the ‘Work at Home Moms Romania’
Association (WAHM) and next she will tell us more about the community of mother
entrepreneurs and their success stories. WAHM is a not-for-profit association
whose purpose is to provide professional support to mothers.

The idea of this association emerged out
of necessity, of the need to accumulate information. And what better way to do
that if not through networking sessions? These meetings take place every month,
because we want to start together on this path of entrepreneurship, which we
consider wonderful. We want to support mothers in their decision to work from
home or to start a business.

In most of the cases, the decision to work from home is made when the
woman becomes pregnant. At that very moment they start asking questions about
how it will be possible for them to spend more time with their kids or how to
improve their relationship with the kids, the quality of the time spent
together with the kids, because a rested and relaxed mother or a mother with a
well-established schedule can pay more attention to her kid. At that moment, they
decide to either work from home or to start a business. Irrespective of what
they may choose, we are there to support them.

We
asked Florentina Baloş if there are many mothers joining the WAHM community:

We organize these meetings ‘Mother entrepreneur connect networking’ all over
the country. Our community is the largest one in the Bucharest-Ilfov area.
Mothers have joined our community along the years and they have attended almost
all the events we have held. In order to have quality meetings, we prefer to
have about 30 participants. In certain months we had more requests for support,
so we had to organize two or three such meetings. But generally we prefer
meetings with 30 participants, for them to be interactive.

Among
the events organized by ‘Work at Home Moms Romania’ Association we can mention
Christmas fairs, Easter fairs, or other fairs devoted to the celebration of spring
or femininity. We asked Florentina Baloş about the professions of the mothers
who join the association:

They come from all walks of life:
hand-made manufacturing, services, graphics, accounting, architecture. There
are mothers who make crochet items, who want to preserve the traditional
costume, therefore we organize many traditional gatherings that start from the
Mum connect meetings.

Next
Florentina Baloş will enlarge upon the support offered by the association

During our meetings we focus a lot on
cooperation. We practically show them the efficiency of cooperation and urge
them to cooperate. And we are happy to discover that many mothers have started
to cooperate with others. We want to boost their confidence, because, in our
opinion, the main obstacle in the way of success is the lack of confidence, of
self-confidence.

At the
beginning of the year the ‘Mother entrepreneur connect networking’ meets to set
out the plans for the future. Florentina Baloş is back at the microphone with
details:

As to our plans for the future, we want
to carry on with these meetings, to take them to another level, in the sense of
bringing experts as guests of the meetings who should talk, for at least an
hour, about various issues such as entrepreneurship or parenting, because it is
difficult enough to be a working-at-home-mother.