Jacquelyne (Ryan) Henson

I'm an EA at Meta, where event planning first came into my life as a core responsibility - I help organize happy hours and social gatherings for my team. I've been officially event planning for 2 years, though I've been doing it unofficially for closer to 10 years. During COVID, when they completely shut down events and everyone was working from home, the event side of my job was removed because we weren't on-site anymore. That's when I started navigating my way into creating the Antisocial Girls Club, a pop-up event business exclusively for women where we feature local women-owned businesses as vendors. It's about creating a safe space for women to gather and hang out, and also get to network across all of our vendors. From that success came Through the Looking Glass, the other side of event planning where people actually hire me to do events for them, from weddings to birthday parties to anything in between. Through the Looking Glass has only been in fruition for about 8 months officially, but I've already done birthday parties and have 3 more on the books. My day is pretty busy - I'm also a mom, so the day starts pretty early with self-care, doing my workout, and then getting my kid off to school. I do my 9-to-5 in the office most of the time, and then my businesses come into play as my second job, my 5-to-9. It's basically the 5-to-9 a.m. shift at home with my kid, the 9-to-5 at Meta, and then the 5-to-9 shift at night at home for my side businesses.