12/06/2026
It's a privilege to lead Mentoring F2F Foundation - an organisation run 100% by volunteers.
On June 8th I stood in Klub Studio in Kraków, Poland and watched something I'll carry with me for a long time: mentees, mentors, STEM students and professionals, 50+ volunteers, partners and speakers - all in one room, around one belief. Nobody had to be there. Everybody showed up. That's not something you can organise. It's something a community builds together.
And the more I sat with it, the clearer the bigger picture became.
The pipeline isn't the problem. Retention is. In Poland, women earn over 40% of STEM degrees - yet make up just 22% of engineers in industry and 28% of senior leadership worldwide (Eurostat 2024; WEF 2025). They start. And they leave. Not for lack of skill - for lack of support. At today's pace, closing the global gender gap will take 123 years (WEF, Global Gender Gap Report 2025). No field can afford to wait that long for half its talent.
This is the gap MentoringF2F Foundation exists to close - and on June 8th, I watched the model do exactly what it's built to do.
Mentoring isn't a feel-good add-on. It's talent infrastructure. By 2030, 39% of today's skills will be obsolete (WEF, Future of Jobs Report 2025), and the capabilities that will define the next decade - resilience, judgement, leadership - aren't coded by an algorithm. They're passed from person to person.
A huge thank-you to our 'Kobiety Rakiety 2026" conference leader Krystyna Brzoska and her team, Anna Karpińska-Rzepa and Roksana Hajduga - you didn't organise an event, you built a community, and a day people will carry with them long after they left Klub Studio. The energy in that room went beyond anything we'd imagined. We even had DJs travel all the way from Denmark to be part of the crowd.
To every mentee, mentor, volunteer, speaker and partner who made this flight possible - thank you, from the heart. ❤️
It's the honour of my career to lead this.
Kobiety Rakiety 2026 💪🚀🔥 See you next year.
Photos: Indywidualny Kadr Fotografia by Amina Dadache-Garus - Thank You 🙏
