Our Story
The Henley Female Collective (formerly the Henley Female Network) is a warm, welcoming community of women built on the belief that real connection changes lives.
Founded in January 2023 by Henley-based life and mindset coach Harriet Barcella, the Collective grew from a simple but powerful idea: that women deserve a dedicated space to be inspired, to have meaningful conversations, to find joy and to build genuine connections - both personally and professionally.
In 2024 Harriet invited Erin Kennedy OBE to speak at a Breakfast Conversation and they quickly discovered a deep shared belief in the power of community. By 2026 Erin came on board and together began to grow the Collective into something even more impactful. What started as a monthly breakfast gathering has grown into a thriving network of like-minded women from Henley and the surrounding area.
Today the Collective has three ways to belong - Breakfast Conversations, Good Company, and Our Table - each one designed to support you through conversation, inspiration and connection.
The Collective has always been about more than the events themselves. It's about the friendships that form over coffee, the professional introductions that lead somewhere unexpected, and the quiet reassurance of knowing there's a community of women who've got your back.
Whether you're looking to grow your professional network, find your people, or simply give yourself a couple of hours of inspiration in your month - you are welcome here.
Meet Erin Kennedy OBE
At 29, Erin was diagnosed with breast cancer. She could have stepped back. Instead she competed through chemotherapy - and won gold. Then she came back and won it again.
But ask Erin what made that possible and she won't point to herself. She'll point to the people around her - the teammates, the supporters, the community that held her when everything was hardest. That experience gave her an unshakeable belief in what women can do for each other when they're truly supported.
Erin joined the Henley Female Collective as partner in 2026, bringing with her not just the extraordinary story of what she's achieved, but a deep and personal understanding of why community matters. She is one of the most decorated coxswains in British rowing history and holds an OBE for her services to rowing - but what she brings to the Collective is something that sits beyond any of those achievements. It's the lived proof that when women show up for each other, the impossible becomes possible.
Meet Harriet Barcella
Harriet has spent her career helping women understand what they're truly capable of. As a life and mindset coach, she has worked one to one and in groups, and what she noticed, time and again, was that the most transformative thing she could offer wasn't a framework or a formula. It was the right room.
The Henley Female Collective grew from that conviction. Harriet created it because she wanted a space that was genuinely different - not a networking event dressed up as something warmer, but a community built from the ground up on authenticity, joy and real human connection.
Three years later, the Breakfast Conversations sell out every month. Our Table - the Collective's intimate inner circle - is born directly from the part of her coaching programme that women said changed them most. Not the content. The community.
Away from the Collective, Harriet is a mother who recently took her children out of school for three months to travel through Central America and then came home and stood in front of her community to talk about what living joyfully actually looks like. She leads from the front, always.