World Athletics Council member Donna Raynor will impart her knowledge to 22 female administrators from the Caribbean during a gender leadership training in Nassau, Bahamas from Thursday to Monday.

Raynor, with over 20 years of sports administration experience, is carrying out the mentorship with Cydonie Mothersille, a fellow World Athletics Council member from Cayman Islands.

Bermuda National Athletics Association general secretary Mia Bean and Jarita Vickers, the association’s treasurer are part of the administrators who will be trained.

“We have World Athletics gender leadership training that’s going to take place in Bahamas with 22 participants from multiple Caribbean islands included,’’ Raynor said. “We have two from Bermuda that will be part of that training as well.”

“The gender leadership that World Athletics puts together is meant to encourage women to put themselves forward as leaders in their organisations.

“We go through several different topics with emphasis on the importance of diversity and gender equity.

“We’re talking about why we think it’s important to have the same number of males and females in our organisations.

“For the next World Athletics elections, we have a few women that will be able to run. Right now we have a gender balance, 13 males and females, so for the next election we want to make sure that we keep that balance.

“We also talk a lot about personal branding and communication. There will be a whole session on this because you have to let people see what your brand is, and you have to know how to communicate especially in a male-dominated world.”

It is the second time that Raynor and Mothersille will be providing guidance to female sports administrators since they were voted to the World Athletics Council in August last year.

“We conducted similar training in January in Miami where we had 13 participants,’’ the former BNAA president said.

“Now that we have 22, it shows that the interest is growing. Here in Bermuda, we just came out of an entire week where it was about females getting involved in sport.

“I’m very pleased that we have several women that put themselves up and are now part of their associations. This includes coaches as well because we have fewer female coaches compared with males, so some of the people that attend the sessions are coaches as well as administrators.

“I was trained by World Athletics to be able to facilitate this training. Two years ago I was in Poland where there were 30 of us, and we were trained to be moderators.

“During these sessions, Cydonie Mothersille and I get to share with the participants our journeys. Both of us sat on our national athletics associations, I was the president of BNAA for 12 years and she’s been general secretary for a similar period.

“We went through a specific path to get to where we are today. We talk about all that so that people know it’s not impossible.”