WoW · Working Women

WoW started from an observation that's as simple as it is often ignored by traditional incubation models: no economic project can hold up without a solid personal balance, without the ability to face everyday challenges with resilience. That's why we built WoW not as a course, but as a protected, generative space, where unemployed women could reinvent themselves starting from who they are, before even getting to a business plan.

In April 2024 we launched the public call, gathering 34 applications for 6 initial spots — a number that says everything about how badly a path like this was needed. Between May and October 2024, six months of continuous incubation inside the coworking: flexible weekly mentoring, two training cycles on the Business Model Canvas and on bureaucratic and financial management. Alongside it, from July to October, experiential workshops on self-care and empowerment — because for us, professional growth is never separate from personal growth.

From September 2024 to February 2025 we paired the path with a storytelling workshop, aimed at creating illustrated comic-strip portraits of the participants and their business ideas — a tool that made projects immediately readable and "authored," instead of staying just numbers in a business plan. On 27 March 2025 we closed the path with a final event handing the results back to the city — around 40 people gathered to tell and hear what had happened over the year.

The network that made all this possible brought together very different skills: Le Onde ETS, a long-standing anti-violence centre in Palermo, essential for careful selection sensitive to vulnerability and for gender-awareness training; 100% Me Stessa ETS, which ran the experiential workshops and storytelling; and the coworking community, which offered up its own freelancers and professionals as trainers.

The results go beyond the numbers: six illustrated portraits produced, one participant who found work aligned with her project, one who landed national artistic commissions, one who now collaborates steadily with our coworking. The overall €15,000 budget, funded by the Tavola Valdese's Eight per Thousand fund, was managed in full compliance with the original plan — funds not needed for social media sponsorships, thanks to a very strong organic response, were reinvested into renewing the web hosting to keep the project's digital presence alive.

With Sementor's eleventh edition, the WoW method wove itself further into our long-running mentorship programme — proof that the balance between knowledge, skill and character — the formula that sums up WoW's approach — is now baked into how we work with anyone who walks in with an idea to grow.