Last summer the WWI board grew from being a one-woman body to a three-women body. This new body, as I understand it, saw itself as transitional, and one of its goals was to help birth a realistic, representative, healthy new board of women to lead our Woman Within Community.

A letter was sent to all members of the community inviting them to join one or more committees that were being formed, representing a variety of aspects of the community. These committees included but were not limited to: fund raising, training, administration and multiculturalism. They were asked to meet, choose a chairwoman, and decide how they would like to work with the WWI board, to share the information they gather or their guidance.

I joined the multicultural team and have since been elected co-chairwoman of it. Barb Rath is my co-chair. This is a report on the work we have done to date. As of the end of November we have had 5 meetings.

The committee has over 20 members who reside all over our community, from South Africa to Great Britain to the West Coast of the US. We have members from every region of WWI but one. We meet every other week on Sundays, by phone conference, usually for about an hour and a half, and do other of our work on a listserv.

We created a mission statement and goals, which read:

Our mission is to individually and collectively foster heightened awareness of multicultural issues and impacts in the Woman Within and affiliated communities.

Our goals are to:

1.Perform an advisory role to the Woman Within International Board and the Woman Within community in making the Woman Within Training Weekend and any other Woman Within weekends, accessible to and safer for, all women within our respective local communities.  Make recommendations as appropriate.

2.Provide leadership and education on multicultural issues as well as to support planning and execution for associated events including but not limited to: liaison with local councils, facilitating, brainstorming and organizing multicultural events.

3.Interact with and work in concert with similar initiatives.

We have already provided requested consultation to the WWI Board on an issue related to diversity sensitivity in the staffing contracts.

We have a resource guide in the works which will detail as many as we can find of the various initiatives related to the topic of diversity that have been created in all of our communities. We expect to offer this to every region so we can all learn from the hard work already having been done in each of our communities on this, and avoid recreating the wheel for lack of this knowledge.

Besides having a secretary and technology lead we have women taking the lead on various topics including the following, some of which are short range and others are long-range goals. (These are not in any specific order.)

Fundraising, grant writing, and more scholarships

Hosting a weekend that is more accessible and friendlier to women with physical disabilities

Creating/Offering a workshop on unearned privilege, especially white privilege

Working on the economic disparity of the dissonance between the cost of our weekend that limits who can participate, and the intention to be inclusive of all women.

Hosting a weekend in prisons.

A suggested protocol we could create for every weekend, about diversity.

Increased participation of women who are members of target groups, i.e. women of color, women with lesbian sexual orientations, differently-abled women, different economic class women.

We welcome any of you to join us. This is an open committee to any member of Woman Within. If you are interested in doing so, please contact me at: Harrieth2@aol.com.

(Clarification: This committee is not a replacement for the ECSC Diversity Committee, which will continue to function specifically for diversity issues within the ECSC community.)

Harriet Hirsch
(WWTW, Sept/Oct 1995, East Coast)
Co-Chairwoman, Woman Within International Multi-Cultural Committee
HarrietH2@aol.com