About Our Club

BPW Coffs Coast - Empowering Women for 50 Years

BPW Coffs Coast is a dynamic community of women dedicated to empowering, supporting, and advocating for women and girls. For the past 50 years, we’ve been making a difference—lobbying governments, collaborating with community organizations, and raising awareness for women’s needs through events and media.

Why Join Us?

BPW is more than just a network—it’s a movement. Meet like-minded women, grow your professional and personal skills, and be part of a powerful voice for change. Whether you’re advancing your career, seeking mentorship, or simply want to make a difference, BPW is your community.

Events That Matter

We host regular events, from our Women Wisdom and Wine series to monthly social gatherings. These aren’t just opportunities to socialize; they’re platforms for advocacy, networking, and personal growth. Join us for lively discussions, expert speakers, and the chance to be part of something bigger.

Community

BPW Coffs Coast (formerly BPW Coffs Harbour) has worked within the community for the past 50 years to support, encourage and empower women and girls in diverse aspects of their lives. To enable this role, BPW is responsive to the emerging changes and needs of the community. Aspects of support include lobbying local and national governments to provide a voice for women and raise awareness of needs, working alongside community organisations to facilitate dialogue and build networks and using a range of media and events to communicate issues and advocate for the needs of local women.

Networking

BPW Coffs Harbour provides a wonderful opportunity for women to meet, network and socialise with other like-minded women. Since its inception in 1972 BPW Coffs Harbour has attracted local women from diverse professional, business and industry settings.

Professional and Personal Development

As a proactive community organisation BPW Coffs Harbour members continue to maintain the established focus on professional and personal development for women and girls through the provision of annual scholarships for female students from Southern Cross University and NSW TAFE (Coffs Harbour Campus).

Events

BPW organises regular events for members and interested community members. Venues and intentions change and commonly respond to local or global themes and trends. The focus always comes back to the goals of – advocacy, mentoring, networking or projects.

Open social event: On the first Wednesday of each month at 10am BPW members and community friends meet for a social gathering over morning tea.

Paid social events: Women Wisdom and Wine Series – 3rd Tuesday of each month at the Pier Hotel Coffs Harbour. Small fee for expert speaker presentation with Q&A style discussion for what is a lively and interesting opportunity to meet with like minded women. See WWW for more info.

We make gender matter

Our advocacy, projects, programs and partnerships focus on issues that affect women and workplaces such as pay inequity, accessible and affordable childcare and housing, a lack of support for women’s refuges and domestic violence.

Our community includes women in a variety of roles – from small and medium-sized businesses through to large multinational corporations and from the public and non-profit sectors, as well as women no longer in paid work, influential women leaders, young career women and savvy entrepreneurs running their own show.
Our club offers scholarships and bursaries for young women in school and university.
We partner with other organisations on projects including International Women’s Day.
Through our meetings and events, personal and professional development programs and other initiatives, we connect and empower women who aspire to do more.

We are part of a national and global network

BPW Coffs Coast is affiliated with BPW Australia. We are a community of women working to end gender inequity. Our members share an interest in the issues that affect working women locally, nationally and around the world today. BPW Australia is affiliated to BPW International, which has consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and has expert and experienced representatives accredited to most United Nations agencies.

Gender equity is a basic human right, and its achievement brings socio-economic benefits to everyone. By empowering women, the broader community thrives, increasing positive productivity and growth. However gender inequities are still deeply entrenched in every society. Women in all parts of the world experience discrimination in areas from access to decent work, health care and education to occupational segregation. Women continue to be significantly under-represented in political, social and economic decision-making processes in almost every country in the world, and the growing gender wage gap and domestic violence have become intractable problems.

Greeting from the Club President

As President of BPW Coffs Harbour I am aware of following in the footsteps of women in our community who cared about matters affecting women who are working either in their own business, as employees or professionals.

Our BPW Coffs Harbour members are committed to the cause of representing our gender to ensure that the issues affecting our local community such as homelessness, gender based violence, lower access to permanent jobs and under representation in decision-making are addressed. Coffs Harbour and the outlying towns making up the Coffs Coast such as Bellingen and Nambucca have a strong indigenous and refugee community and I hope to encourage more collaboration to work with them to ensure all local women are adequately represented, advocated for and assisted by BPW Coffs Coast

Debbie Petlueng, President BPW Coffs Harbour

Email Me directly