Sponsored Content: What women gain when they show up

Every woman who has stepped into public leadership knows the feeling of walking into a room and wondering if she belongs there. The doubt is common. What separates the women who push through it from those who don’t is often something simple: they found the right community at the right moment.

That is exactly what WPLN’s National Summit is built to be.

This June 4-5, the Women’s Public Leadership Network will host its Fifth Annual National Summit in Philadelphia at the historic Union League. The Summit brings together center- and right-leaning women from across the country — including first-time candidates, sitting officials, campaign professionals, and civic leaders — for two days of hands-on training, strategic conversations, and the kind of relationship-building that doesn’t happen over Zoom.

Skills you can use immediately

The Summit is not a series of panels where experts talk at you. It’s a working event. Sessions focus on the practical challenges women in public leadership actually face: how to communicate your message under pressure, how to build and manage a campaign, how to navigate media, how to lead effectively in institutions that weren’t always designed with women in mind.

Past Summit programming has drawn on the experience of women who have run for office—won, lost, and come back — and who are willing to be honest about what they learned. The result is training that is specific, tactical, and grounded in real experience rather than general leadership advice.

Women who attend leave with frameworks they can apply, language they can borrow, and a clearer sense of where they are in their own leadership journey—and what the next step looks like.

The network that stays with you

The relationships formed at the Summit tend to outlast the event itself. This is by design. WPLN draws women from across the country and across levels of experience, which means that the woman sitting next to you in a session might be a state legislator, a county commissioner, a first-time candidate, or someone who ran a national campaign. That diversity of experience in the room is part of the value.

Those connections become a national bench. Women leave with peers who understand the specific pressures of public leadership because they are living them, too. That network shows up when you need a sounding board, a reference, a referral, or just someone who gets it.

Why national events matter

Local networks are essential, but something shifts when you step outside your state and into a room of women doing this work across the country. You begin to see patterns you couldn’t see from inside your own community. You realize your challenges are shared. You pick up solutions that haven’t reached your state yet. And you return home with a broader sense of what’s possible.

For women in public leadership, those moments of perspective can make the difference between burning out and pushing forward.

Philadelphia this summer is the right place for that conversation. The city is about to mark 250 years since the founding of the United States, a founding that explicitly excluded women from its promises, and yet one that women have spent the last 250 years reshaping. 

The next chapter of women’s leadership is still being written. The Summit is where you help write it.

Register for the 2026 WPLN National Summit at the Union League of Philadelphia, June 4-5.

Larissa Martinez is the founder and president of Women’s Public Leadership Network.