In listening to Maria speak about her life, you get the unmistakable feeling that she is every bit as much the kind of woman as those she’d like to see come away empowered by The Women’s Conference, the annual event she has worked on for the past five years. Career woman, mother, wife – all the roles she has embraced, and all the types of women she hopes to get mixing, mingling and networking at this year’s event, held for the fifth year running in Long Beach, on October 22.

“A goal of mine is to say we are all women together, not divided. I’m trying to promote a sense of unity,” she says. “Not just among political parties but among women from different walks of life. My goal was to make it…unifying in that you could be at a table where you could have a Fortune 500 woman next to a stay-at-home mom, or you could have a woman who chose to have children next to those who chose not to, and that really we were all the same.”

She continues, “I try to program it from the point of view of a woman’s mind, her heart, her body and her soul, and empowering every part of it, so I try to make sure I’m empowering her financially. I’m trying to empower her spiritually, I’m trying to empower her authentic self.”

One of the ways she and the other organizers will help to make this happen for participants is to offer an exciting new addition to the Women’s Conference this year – a pre-conference event called Night at The Village. It will take place at the Convention Center from 5:00pm-9:00pm on October 21 and feature book signings with Jamie Lee Curtis, Rachael Ray, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and Maria Shriver herself. She says that women attending the conferences in years past said they didn’t have quite enough time to listen to all of the riveting speakers, to participate and network, to shop, and to check out the sponsors.

“I wanted to create something …which was like a mall for women, about women and that featured things that were of interest to women,” Maria explains. “I wanted a mall where really I felt like wow, what about if I go and there are people signing books that I actually want to buy, what if there is music there that I enjoy, what if there are women entrepreneurs like me who are trying to start businesses or who are selling things that are of interest to me. And what if I actually had an evening where I could just meet women, talk to women, sit around and be with women and just have a night to feel free.”

Rachael Ray is featured as a main speaker at the Night at The Village, and there will be a special section dedicated to living green, as well as programming on fashion, food and fitness. Organizers like Maria planned this event so that every woman attending could take away something valuable from the experience.

The following day’s programming will be just as rewarding, with an impressive list of compelling speakers. There are many who are wellknown, like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christiane Amanpour, Caroline Kennedy, Heidi Klum, Sarah Jessica Parker, Gloria Steinem, Lance Armstrong, Bono, Michael J. Fox, Condoleezza Rice, Sally Field, and more, as well as speakers who might not spend their lives in the spotlight but have interesting jobs and experiences, and who promise to lead incredible sessions.

Clearly, the women who will be attending the conference know they are in for something special – the event sold out in a record three hours this year. The success of the event will help to support the First Lady’s decision to keep it in Long Beach, when people were saying it should be moved to a larger city.

“After the first two years when it looked like it was growing huge, I had a lot of options to move it,” says Maria. “There was a kind of groundswell, ‘You need to move it to LA, it’s getting so successful. You should move it to the north, you should move it around.’ San Diego wanted it; they have a much bigger convention center. But I decided to keep it in Long Beach because I liked the community feel that one got when one went to Long Beach.”

Maria also thought of the conference as a way to make a difference in the community, and she says she has worked hard to try to foster a bigger relationship between the conference and the city. Each year’s event leaves a legacy by investing in areas that will make a lasting difference. A playground was built with proceeds from the event last year (one of the 27 that Shriver has helped build since becoming First Lady), and this year funds will go towards supporting domestic violence shelters.

“Domestic violence is a huge issue obviously for women and it’s one of the places where women have the most difficulty feeling empowered,” she says. “People who have been victims of domestic violence often feel like they don’t have a voice, they don’t feel empowered, they don’t feel like anybody cares about them and…it was just an area I thought I could support, so I wanted to make a donation to the groups that work in domestic violence in Long Beach. I wanted to have a local partnership is the right way of putting it.”

Shriver has built programs with lasting legacies that are not only confined to the city limits of Long Beach, but enrich the lives of women in the entire state of California, through initiatives such as California Volunteers, a program that was “created to improve coordination of volunteer efforts between the state’s departments and agencies”, and other programs that benefit all American women. The Minerva Awards recognizes women who have made “extraordinary contributions in the areas of the Arts, Health and Sciences, Community Activism, Human Rights, Business and Technology, Motherhood, Innovation, Education and Finance.” (Information from californiawomen.org).

Maria continues to build on these and more programs through her job as First Lady, to make her time in the role leave its own legacy.

“Whoever came after me, whether it’s a man or a woman, [I] wanted to hand them something of substance,” she says. “I really embrace it for what it is, which is a job and an opportunity to really have an impact in people’s lives.”

Still, the woman who prefers to be just called Maria, doesn’t want anybody to think of her as the answer to their prayers. She would prefer that the lesson she leaves with women, is to connect with themselves first. “I don’t mean that in a selfish way,” she explains, “but I think women spend so much of their time trying to please other people that they lose themselves along the way and they lose any connection to their own intuition, their own gut and their own dream. Once you kind of connect to yourself, once you understand who you are, there’s tremendous power and empowerment that comes from that. And people will ask you to pass that on. They will ask you to lead, they will ask you for inspiration, for advice.”

Clearly people have asked Maria for advice and inspiration, and she’s given that and so much more.