Brand Ambassador and Social Good – iRetreat Recap!

Disclosure: Thank you to Pure Via for sponsoring my iRetreat attendance and this post. 

Y’all, my life has been crazy the last two weeks!

Thankfully, it has really been a good kind of crazy. Last week…wait, was that last week? In the whirlwind of events time has become a bit of a blur… Let’s try this again…

On Sunday, after the movers packed up almost all our earthly belongings and loaded them on the moving truck, I headed down to New Orleans for iRetreat blog conference.  I had the great privilege of representing Pure Via, an official sponsor of iRetreat conference, as their brand ambassador for the conference.  For those who aren’t familiar with Pure Via, they make a variety of 0-calorie sweeteners made from the stevia plant. Our family loves stevia. It has helped us cut out a LOT of our sugar consumption.

Sunday started with a meet and greet. I met several amazing bloggers and introduced them to Pure Via.

Blogging is interesting because you rarely interact with other bloggers in person, more so being the only blogger I know of in the Shreveport, Louisiana area. It was really fun to put real live faces to the blog, rather than the static profile picture you see in the “About Me” section day after day.

Monday morning we listened to Megan Jordan from Velveteen Mind about using your blog for social good. How inspiring! It really helped me re-evaluate my mission for my blog.

Later that morning we had a snack break provided by Pure Via. The fruit presentation (which I couldn’t get a good shot of because it was enormous!) was amazing!

The setup was amazing and the food was delicious. I mentioned earlier that we use stevia every day in our family,  but I’d never tried stevia on my strawberries before. I have a weakness for strawberries with powdered sugar. I LOVE, LOVE strawberries with powdered sugar. I was a little doubtful that stevia would taste quite as good on my strawberries, but, Oh, man! It was perfect!

I just used one of those little single serve packets and that is all I needed.

After the Pure Via snack break, we heard from an amazing non-profit organization called Save the Children. I highly encourage you to check it out and find out how you can be a catalyst for change in the lives of struggling children in our nation and throughout the world. We danced through the streets of the French Quarter in a second line parade with Save the Children to commemorate Hurricane Katrina recovery and to bring awareness to establishing an emergency plan for your family.

The rest of the conference was amazing! I learned a ton. I was so impressed and inspired by some of the speakers. I’m hoping to make some gradual changes to Oh So Savvy Mom over the next several months to better serve and inspire you, my readers, and to establish a greater sense of community among us.