The Shine Festival is an annual event created by Tammy Darcy, founder of The Shona Project, an award winning Waterford based non-profit organisation inspired by her late sister Shona.
In it's fifth year, Shine Festival has become a female empowerment movement and for the past five days we have been celebrating International Day of The Girl, which took place on Wednesday. This year's festival saw over 100 of Ireland's most inspirational women take to the stage, both online and in person to share their advice and stories.
Gold winning Olympian, Boxer Kellie Harrington was one of the leading female speakers on day two of the festival. As well as the difficulties she faced being a woman in sport, she also spoke about her struggles with addiction and her sexuality. Sharing one of her personal pre-fight mantras, she spoke about the importance of positive affirmations and explained how she mentally prepares herself before entering the ring. She encouraged the attendees to "embrace the madness."
"Embrace Your Madness."
"It's about expressing it and not being afraid to be your true self and just embracing the madness. And I believe that when you embrace that you can truly be who you want to be and no fear will stop you."
Other key speakers who took to the stage on Thursday included world renowned product designer and founder of The Big Idea initiative Kim McKenzie, who told the girls that creativity is progress. She also drew our attention to some interesting gender disparity statistics in relation to product design. A lot of products that we use on a daily basis are still being designed with a male preference in mind. The average width of a female's hand is 3.1 inches, and even though Apple iPhones are used in the majority by females, a mid-sized iPhone measures 5.5 inches.
The key message taken away from day two of the festival was to be your own person, with Activist and Creative Director of Black and Irish, Amada Ade giving this advice to the young women of Ireland:
"Don't limit yourself in your own mind, don't let other people's words limit you and don't be afraid to branch out, do what you want to do and step out of your comfort zone"
Listen back to all the highlights from the Shine Festival on the Beat News spotlight series here: Shine Festival Podcast
