Interview: Georgia Brooks
CEO and founder creating Belgium's first female-focused private members' club.
A PASSION THING is a magazine dedicated to telling the stories of people from around the world who are driven by the wonderful force we call passion. We’re excited to take these conversations beyond the page and into the digital world, with Substack as our new home.
This interview appears in A PASSION THING Issue No. 07
Georgia Brooks is the Founder of The Nine, Belgiums First Female-Focused Private Members’ Club. That was all I knew of her, from LinkedIn, but I was immediately intrigued. So we set up an interview. Georgia and I spoke online, where she sat in front of a wall of silk roses, just four weeks before she went on maternity leave to prepare for the birth of her daughter. From the first answer to my first question, her multi-faceted life was dazzling.
Which values would you say formed your childhood and upbringing?
Georgia The overall values were kindness, judgement of what is ethically right or wrong, and being just. This came from parents with nomadic and sometimes tumultuous journeys on both sides of their families. My father and his family fled London for the countryside during wartime and my mother was Lebanese, but grew up in Egypt’s capital, Cairo. Her family left for Canada in the 1970s, and after a serendipitous meeting on a flight between Cairo and London, my father followed her to Montreal. They then came back to the UK because they wanted me to have a UK passport and education.
I spent most of my childhood weekends and holidays doing community work and volunteering. The overall slogan was: we’re lucky to be here and we’ll use our position to give back. It was a kind of assimilation. I never spoke Arabic with my mother in public. I straightened my hair. When people asked me where I was from, I only referred to Canada. I wanted to be part of the group, not different.
