Last week, the Senator spent Thursday and Friday speaking with hundreds of Virginians in a variety of settings in Petersburg, Richmond and Chesterfield.

Thursday night, when late votes disrupted his plan to attend a dinner meeting of the Petersburg Chamber of Commerce, the Senator spoke live from his Capitol Hill office via Skype.

The next morning, we drove to Richmond for a full-day of events, beginning with a radio call-in interview with Richmond’s Morning News with Jimmy Barrett on WRVA Radio. Jimmy poked fun at the Senator’s recent encounter with pop diva Katy Perry, but the interview quickly focused on Senator Warner’s efforts to form a bipartisan coalition to tackle the budget deficit and national debt. 

The Senator then attended a fun event at the MathScience Innovation Center with the top guy at NASA, Dr. Charles Bolden, and Richmond Congressman Bobby Scott. The leaders spoke with a great group of 7^th and 8^th graders about the importance of science, technology, engineering and math education.

The Senator also had this to say about realizing your dreams: 

“Most people don’t know that I was the first person to go to college in my family and that my first two businesses failed,” Senator Warner said. “But I learned from my failures and kept up the hard work, and eventually I was pretty successful when I invested in this crazy new idea that my buddy told me about – these things called ‘car telephones’... cell phones.”

The students worked on hands-on experiments led by members of NASA, including designing and building rockets that they got to shoot off – with some help from Senator Warner and Congressman Scott. Check out the video below to watch.

Later that afternoon, the Senator spoke to about 700 women at the Women Who Mean Business Summit, an event designed to help develop a new crop of women entrepreneurs and business leaders. In many ways, the event was similar to our first annual Virginia Women’s Conference held last November, which focused on providing helpful advice on topics like career and business development and planning for retirement. Senator Warner welcomed women to the Summit and spoke about work he is doing on Capitol Hill to encourage small business development in Virginia and around the country. 

Later in the day, the Senator visited with members of the Chesterfield County Chamber of Commerce, and he finished the day at the annual awards banquet by Richmond’s Metropolitan Business League.