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How to Find Your Tribe and Love Them Well with Raquelle Akavan, PA-C and Founder of The PA Moms Group!
It gets harder to make really good friends the older we get, am I right? Living in community with other like minded, diverse and supportive mommas, that’s the dream, right?
From early in our lives, playdates to elementary school to middle school to high school and even into college you are in an automatic community; with your classmates, your teammates, your bandmates, and then even, early on, with your colleagues.
And then… you have kids. I have struggled to make quality friends with other moms who “get it”, who see me and who support me for who I am as a busy working mom.
I’m so thankful to have found the Physician Associate (PA Moms) Moms Group on Facebook. It’s a community of 11,000+ Mommas who are PAs, living their lives, sharing memes and supporting each other.
My friend Rocky Akavan is the queen of creating online communities that are just like that and she’s sharing all about one that’s about to make your life a whole lot more fun! Rocky was kind enough to share the microphone with me on Episode 56 of Fulfilled – The Podcast with me to talk about building community, advocacy, advancing the profession, juggling work and life and overcoming challenges along the way!
Raquelle Akavan is a mom, wife, community building woman who has been a surgical PA for the last 10 years. She recently has poured into building an online community of PA Moms that is over 11,000 members strong and starting a nonprofit for advocacy for women in medicine. She is passionate about supporting and empowering PAs to lead and loves to support PAs in their careers to improve the overall health and outcomes for their patients.
Rocky created the PA Moms Community after becoming a Mom and struggling to connect with other PA Moms in her life. She knew her surgeons belonged to a Physician Moms group… but there was no PA Moms group to be found… and the PA Moms group was born. It has grown from two to ten thousand mommas strong and serves as a beacon of light and a community in the craziness of life as a PA Mom.
After becoming an AAPA special interest group and starting the nonprofit of PAs for Women Empowerment, Rocky became even more passionate about advocacy and changing the face of medicine for PAs, Women, and the World!
She’s quick to thank her team of leadership within the PA Moms group and the board of directors for the PAs for Women Empowerment nonprofit as keys to her success. Rocky values collaboration over competition and believes that as working women we are responsible for stepping into leadership roles, connecting with and mentoring other women in the workplace and improving things for all as we do just that.
Rocky opens up about her experience with a significant stroke as a young mom and the recovery, as well as how this changed her perspective and her motivation to make a difference in the world! To hear the entirety of Episode 56, here ya go!
