Helen Harris – CWC-FPRA President, 1996.
Helen Harris is happily working from her home office as a global communications manager with PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
After leaving FCCI Insurance and the Central West Coast Chapter of FPRA in late 1997, I worked for the company known today as Syniverse Technologies, but when I joined it was a business unit of GTE. I went through the merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic that gave birth to Verizon, and then a subsequent spinoff and IPO that formed Syniverse. After about eight years there, I moved on and was the corporate communications manager for Maritrans, which was a small U.S. based shipping company (as in oil tankers and tug barges). After just three months on the job, I survived an acquisition by the much larger, global shipping company Overseas Shipholding Group and stayed in my role there for eight years, until the company filed for Chapter 11 and my job was eliminated. For the past five years, I’ve been with PwC and in my current role, I manage internal and external communications for several practice areas (health, government). I’m on a virtual team with colleagues based all over the world and primarily work from home, which is a dream come true after commuting to Tampa for many years as well as Sarasota. I still live in beautiful St. Petersburg, still married to the same guy and still have cats. And I hope to retire in a few years!
FPRA was instrumental in my professional development, both the Tampa Bay and Central West Coast Chapters. The opportunity to be a board member and then chapter president for CWC chapter was tremendously fulfilling, both personally and professionally. I improved my public speaking and meeting management skills, we had excellent programs, the more senior practitioners were great mentors for me and I got to know so many nice people along the way. Going to the state conference in Boca Raton as chapter president was a highlight in my career. CWC is a special chapter – it continues to thrive where others seem to struggle. It’s the people, their commitment – I just have very fond memories of that time period. Shout out to Cheray Keyes-Shima – she’s the best!