This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. This is a personal view from a Family Medicine faculty development director on how she became interested in medical education, specifically faculty development, and became a leader in this field. The article describes how she determined that there were issues with accessing professional development events among the department faculty, and her attempt to improve access using innovative strategies and creative faculty development programming. Collaboration with a medical education research colleague to evaluate the resulting faculty development programme is described as key to determining if access to faculty development education is improved, and if the education provided is valuable to the department faculty members.