MEET STACY
Stacy Cassio is the Founder & CEO of the Pink Mentor Network. Stacy understands the importance of mentorship because her own career was built on the opportunities given to her by mentors.
Stacy has worked in many different industries including insurance investigation, engineering management, manufacturing new product development, and operations for an employee assistance program. The vast exposure to many industries proved to Stacy the importance of great mentors as a career development tool that can help women connect professional “dots”.
In 2017, Stacy Cassio founded the Pink Mentor Network, Charlotte’s 1st female mentorship community. Today, the network helps thousands of women who are seeking career mentorship.
“Legacy is the lives we impact, not the lives we create. Mentorship is my vehicle to greater impact.”
ABOUT PMN
Stacy Cassio founded the Pink Mentor Network in April 2017.
At the time, Stacy led an all male engineering team in a male-led manufacturing firm that served a male-dominated industry. She turned to external sources for female mentorship. That quest proved to be more difficult than expected because while women would have coffee or make introductions, true mentorship never emerged.
Stacy launched “Mentor Dinners”. She invited the most successful female leaders & executives to share their experiences & mentorship about a topic she needed
development on. Then, she invited other women to attend.
In July 2018, Stacy turned the community into a business.
As the events & community multiplied in 2019, Stacy began to recognize patterns in member challenges and started to build strategies to overcome them. That mindset led to a new model for mentorship. It gives learners six types of mentors to look for at key moments in their careers, and three levels of mentorship needed to accelerate our careers or businesses.
The new model of mentorship is called “Pop-Up Mentor” because anyone has the potential to be a great mentor when we know who we are looking for, what to ask, and how to develop the relationship.
In 2020, as the pandemic forced us to socially distance, companies began to turn the Pop-Up Mentor model as an alternative way to support & develop the underrepresented among them. The first requests were to transition existing mentorship pairing programs to virtual mentorship communities.
Next, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) sought out the Pop-Up MentorTM model to provide greater support for their female workforces who were feeling the remote work-life implosion. As the year progressed, companies began implementing the Pop-Up Mentor model as a diversity, inclusion, & equity initiative to have conversations around shared pain points.
More recently, Stacy has been helping organizations with executive legacy & impact building programs where folks in power are encouraged to package & sponsor the next generation of diverse leadership around them.
AWARDS
AWARDS
AWARDS
AWARDS
AWARDS
Charlotte Inno’s “Opportunity Champion” Award
Mecklenburg Times 2019 Phenom Acquisition
International’s Most Influential Mentorship Innovator - 2021
Meck Times 50 Most Influential Women
2021 Female Thought Leader - Business Services by the Stevie Awards™
Empowering Women in Industry - 2021 Mentor of the Year