The Brilliant Breakfast at Colart

October 15, 2021 |

This year, Colart partnered with The Brilliant Breakfast, a nationwide event to raise funds for The Prince's Trust to support young women in the UK. "They are committed to changing the lives of disadvantaged young women by raising funds for The Prince's Trust - helping them get the confidence and skills they need to go into education, work, or training".

Driving our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives forward, Colart's commitment to this partnership is to run a series of Brilliant Breakfast's across as many sites as possible. This included Kidderminster, Le Mans, London Hub, Lowestoft, Minehead and Piscataway.

Of course, DEI celebrates differences, and it has been wonderful to know this is precisely what happened during the Brilliant Breakfast's. Le Mans, specifically, marked with a difference. Scroll down further to read about the heartfelt session hosted by our very own Nadia Jellab.

Our differences were also celebrated and demonstrated in the LeadersPlus article and video we published this week which you can view here.

Our values of Openness, Passion, Innovation, and Quality echo in every aspect of this week's activities. This is truly an example of "feeling like a family", our Colart family.

What happened during the day?

UK

The London Hub hosted its own breakfast to support young women across the UK while also championing the incredible women at Colart. The breakfast was divided into two parts, the first one with special guest Victoria McLean, CEO of City CV, who discussed the effect and ramifications of COVID-19 on women's careers and finances along with other key challenges women face through their career and how to overcome them:

The Covid-19 Shecession
Career breaks - is confidence the casualty?
Recognising and beating imposter syndrome
Smashing the glass ceiling
The Art of self-promotion and personal branding

Victoria asked several questions to the physical and online audience, provoking thought and reflection in a dynamic and impactful way.

The second part was an open discussion among the attendees at the London Hub following these three questions:

How do you feel we support women at Colart?
What do we do well?
One thing you would like to see change now

Minehead, Lowestoft and Kidderminster were online guests to the event and hosted similar breakfast sessions resulting in some insightful discussions.

US

The brilliant Breakfast was well received, and they were able to present the UK recording to our Piscataway Team. As part of their next steps, they will have the local leadership team play the UK video within their teams to enable further discussions. They are looking forward to sharing those results.

You can watch the event below.

Le Mans - Resilience: Change Leads into Gold Thanks to Art

Colart Le Mans hosted a slightly different Brilliant Breakfast themed around “hope” with host, Nadia Jalleb, Packaging Buyer & NPD Buyer at Colart, sharing her personal experiences. If you want to meet Nadia, you can click here and read the article we published a few months ago.

During the event, Nadia shared her journey of resilience and how art was the medium that helped her out of a difficult period.
The event was hosted online and onsite, and it was a total success, with many people attending. You can watch the session below, in French, or you can read Nadia's piece:

"My mission is to pass on hope by talking about my journey of resilience through Art. To help these men and women who, like all of us, are going through or are still going through difficult times in their lives.
We are all traumatised. Resilience makes it possible to no longer wonder "why this happened to me", but what do I do with this difficulty? My resilience (strength) was to create a dress as a work of Art.

To come out of a difficult period, from trauma, some make films; others write a book. My process of creation was sewing. I used the resources I had: my taste for clothing, material, artistic creation, and Haute Couture, to rebuild the injured woman, dress her, sew her up, restore her vitality and dignity. Today, my goal is to testify, to transmit to associations that help women (and men) victims of violence, in colleges to communicate with young people to face the grief etc. and companies open to this idea.

#Warrior is pure creation. My goal was to participate in an exhibition on the subject of Women's Rights in March 2021: my process went through searching for images on the internet, in magazines, museum visits in Paris, artist residencies, designer shops, look at stories about creators to find the fabrics, shapes, materials that would give me emotion and could help me to build and translate in the form of a garment, a work of Art and pay tribute to the strong woman that came out of the trauma. The work was done with my friend Martin, stylist and illustrator of Fashion. We created the dress from A to Z: every detail is reflected, consciously or unconsciously.

My journey began in 2010 with the painting and Oils Bars of Winsor&Newton, which revealed my attraction for the material…
I have the wish to make another garment. It will bear another name because I think I am at peace with the Warrior in me.

We can deal with our traumas by taking our resources from us. What happens to us is not inevitable, we are all actors in our lives, and whoever we are, we all have a creative part in us and can use these resources to go well and do something beautiful about what happened to us."