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Gardian of the Month: Kate Pojeta

Our Gardian of the Month is Kate Pojeta, Director of Meetings and Technology for Event Garde.

Learn: What's one subject you'd like to learn more about? 

If I think of this from a professional stance, my answer is “facilitation work”. It’s something I did for years without the knowledge that there is so much MORE to how I was trained to perform that work. While the experiences I delivered before being enlightened were adequate for their intended purposes, as I’ve learned more about this work - the process, thinking, methods and strategies - I am more and more intrigued!

Network: How do you help someone not comfortable networking at a professional event loosen up? 

As an introvert and expert at avoiding networking, and at the same time someone that is asked to facilitate networking events, I like to think I help others that are uncomfortable by sharing those honest feelings with people up front, by putting it out there about how awkward networking can be. When facilitating those events, I try to give them an environment and tools for the experience so that it is (hopefully) less awkward.

Transfer: Tell us about an experience in which you learned something new and then applied it to your personal or professional life.

In my work with one particular client, a few years back, I was introduced to the concept of pronouns being used and the importance of that, at a time before it was more widely used. Learning about why those were important helped me both in personal and professional endeavors to provide events and interactions that were inclusive and welcoming. That has catapulted my desire to learn more about gender-based challenges, which has further propelled me to educate myself more on racial, social and educational inequities.

Please share with us a resource and why you can’t live without it.

I love to read and if money was no object, I would buy ALL. THE. BOOKS. However, I don’t tend to re-read books, so it’s not an expense I want to incur nor one that is really necessary, and of course, money is a factor overall, so limitless books is not in my future. I am a frequent visitor to my local library and when their hours were impacted in 2020 by COVID-19, I went in search of inexpensive books. I stumbled upon betterworldbooks.com and it’s like a personal party whenever a box of books arrives! I can save my list of books I want to read, buy most of them at less than $5 per book, and when I buy from them, they donate books on their end of things. When I’m done reading a book, I deposit it in one of the many local “book nooks” or “little library” locations around my city - or I donate back to my library, thus doubling the donation efforts and hopefully introducing someone to a book they might not have found elsewhere!

Just for Fun: Which actor or actress would you most like to meet and why?

Tom Hanks. His breadth of work is so impressive and I’m captivated by so much of what he has produced and acted in. I appreciate his personal sense of humor, his down to earth style, family values, etc.

By: Kara Nacarato | Jun, 2 2023
Meetings

Tackling Your Food and Beverage Challenges

Wouldn't it be nice to have a secret formula that would magically select the perfect F&B that would accommodate all attendees and ensure everyone was happy with every meal? Unfortunately, we haven't found that quite yet, but here are a few tips and considerations you may find helpful while planning your next meeting or conference.

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Seamlessly Transitioning Presentations with Pre/Post Slideshows 

Kate shares some solutions to the challenge of having “pre-session” rotating slides to show before a presentation and having to swap slideshows for the presentation itself - which often looks and feels clunky. Here's her solution to this big little issue!

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Gardian of the Month: Katie Gadulka

Katie Gadulka is our Gardian of the Month! Find out something she'd like to learn more about, if she considers herself a natural networker, how she makes her industry better, that one things she can't live without and what food she would choose if she could only eat one for a week! 

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By: Yesenia Murillo | May, 12 2023
Health

Prioritizing The Tender Parts of You

Why is it that we often have reservations about sharing the tender parts of our soul, heart, and mind? Tenderness and vulnerability are not foreign to the human experience, they’re in fact universal core characteristics. Yesenia shares some promising ways to prioritize the tender parts of you.

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(Re) Committing to Our Values

The Event Garde team is committed to holding ourselves accountable to our core values. These values serve as the foundation for how we work with one another, our partners, and our clients and it’s important that they continue to be an accurate reflection of who we aim to be. Here's what happened from the intentional revisiting of these values. 

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By: Aaron Wolowiec | Apr, 28 2023
Meetings

Stop Boring Your Meeting Attendees: 10 Recommendations for a Better First Impression

I recently attended an industry conference. I sat in the opening general session patiently awaiting the keynote speaker to take the stage, but what followed was a 15-minute laundry list of announcements and appreciations that very few people were interested in. As I sit in the audience on this particular day, not as a planner but as an attendee, I realize how this opening has landed – and it’s not a great first impression. So, what’s the resolution? Following are 10 recommendations that you can mix and match to stop boring your meeting attendees and set a better first impression.

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