For months, FWA Executive Director Alissa Desmarais and I had been building toward something incredible: a six-day International Business Conference in the UAE, complex and high-stakes, the kind of undertaking that requires you to hold a hundred things in your head at once while also holding your team together, your partners together, and yourself together. The FWA has more than 40 years of experience organizing international conferences around the world; what we were doing was not new. But as we stepped into our new roles as the conference organizers, with the support of a great IBC committee, this one felt different. More meaningful, because it was ours. We were proud of what we were creating.
And then the world changed around us.
I won’t pretend the decision to pivot was easy, because it wasn’t. There is a particular kind of grief that comes not from losing something you already had, but from letting go of something you had worked so hard to build and had not yet gotten to experience. We had to look at the geopolitical reality of the region, at what was happening, at what we could not control, and make a call. The kind of call that no planning document prepares you for.
We chose to pivot.
On May 5th and 6th, FWA will host the Global Capital and Leadership Forum in New York. A virtual lunch panel, followed by an in-person morning program at Akin, right in the heart of the city. Smaller in scale, yes. But not smaller in purpose. We kept the questions we had always meant to explore: how shifting alliances and energy transitions are redrawing the map of global capital, what resilient leadership looks like in a world that will not hold still, how women are shaping the future of finance across cultures and geographies. Her Excellency Amna Almheiri, Consul General of the United Arab Emirates in New York, will close our forum. The relationship did not end when our plans changed. The dialogue did not stop. It just found a different room.
What I have learned from this experience is something I keep coming back to: a pivot is not the opposite of commitment. Done with clarity and care, it is one of commitment’s truest expressions, because it means you care more about the mission than about being right about how you planned to serve it. It means you can look at the people who gave months of real effort to a plan that changed and help them see that nothing they did was wasted, because it wasn’t. It means you can let go of the version of success you had pictured and trust that a different shape can carry the same substance.
I think about the women in this community who have had to do this in their own careers and lives. Who had to walk away from something they had built toward for years, not because they failed but because the world shifted and they were honest enough to shift with it. That takes courage. It takes the kind of steadiness that is very easy to admire from the outside and very hard to practice from the inside.
The forum is still taking shape. The work continues. And I am proud of what we are making, not in spite of how we got here, but because of it.
Albana Theka
President, 2025-2026
Financial Women’s Association
