Come for the agenda. Stay for what happens inbetween sessions.
Here is what nobody puts in an agenda, but everyone who has been to a PWN summit knows.
It is the conversation that starts in the coffee queue and is still going at midnight. It is sitting next to someone from Istanbul, or Brussels, or Madrid and realising that you have been navigating the same challenge from opposite sides of the world. It is the moment in a session when something is said out loud that you have been thinking for years and did not know how to articulate, and you look around the room and see thirty other people nodding.
It is Marijo Bos, who spent years expanding this network city by city, now sitting in a room filled with the community’s of the networks she helped build. It is Sonya Richardson and Rebecca Fountain, who have been through more chapters of this story than almost anyone, carrying an institutional warmth that no onboarding document could ever replicate.
It is the career that shifted because of a hallway exchange. The board seat was taken because someone in this network made one introduction at exactly the right moment. The friendship that began at the Presidents dinner five years ago will continue into the future.
This is what PWN enables: development, networking, but above all, it enables the accumulation of trust between people who are genuinely invested in each other: the willingness, the generosity, and the particular feeling of a room where people have chosen to return, year after year, because they know what it gives them and what it asks of them in return.
Lisbon will evoke that feeling at its most concentrated level.
The Centro Cultural de Belém sits at the edge of the Tagus River, where explorers once gathered the courage to sail into the unknown. The agenda is the strongest we have built, the speakers will challenge you, and the conversations will stay with you.
Collaborative Intelligence will define your strategy.
But what you will carry longest is the room itself: the people in it, the 30 years of shared history that hum beneath every session, every meal, every exchange between someone who has been here from the beginning and someone arriving for the first time.
Come to Lisbon. Not just for the summit, but rather to be in a room where you completely belong.
If you have been to PWN Summit before, you already know why you are coming back. If you have not, this is the one to start with. 30 years of a community gathered in Lisbon in June to talk about power, progress, and what happens next.
Before Lisbon, a moment for what brought us here.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox founded PWN in Paris in 1996 with a single conviction: that women connecting deliberately, across borders and industries, could do something individual effort alone could not. She will close this Summit, speaking about longer lives, reinvention, and what leadership looks like across the full arc of a career. That she closes what she opened, thirty years later, in a room built by the community she started, is the whole story of PWN in one moment.
Two years ago, in 2024, our then co-presidents, Nadine Castellani and Virginia Otel, understood the ambitious vision for a summit. Planned for International Women’s Day, the network came together at the European Parliament in Strasbourg: the kind of summit that enters a community’s shared memory and remains.
Lisbon carries that lineage. And moves it forward.
Mónica d’Orey Santiago and Yolanda Gutiérrez, the Co-Presidents of PWN Global today, shaped the vision and held the strategic ambition of this year’s summit in conjunction with PWN’s 30th anniversary, in trust for the whole network. Their leadership has been the constant thread through every debate about this summit, while pointing clearly at what comes next for the world of leadership.
Robert Baker and Sharon Schön, thought-leadership strategists, are co-curating the agenda. Together, they have built two days around Collaborative Intelligence: Power. Progress. People. Three words. Thirty years of meaning behind them.