Including everyone’s voices is a challenge at WISH and participation in the WAG continues to be up and down. However, women who do attend have become more skilled at conducting meetings, taking minutes, initiating new ideas and advocating for themselves. We also developed literacy strategies to solve problems that kept recurring in the meetings such as: following an agenda when everyone wants to talk now and making sure that women’s voices were being heard in the WISH organization.
Waiting for your turn to speak is difficult for some women and has resulted in women just walking out. We experimented with giving women a chance to talk right away, but this frustrated other women who had been patient already. In the end, we introduced a minutes sheet and encouraged everyone at the table to take minutes, not just the minute taker. On the sheet, there was a place for individuals to write their ideas or concerns down. If the meeting didn’t get to a specific item before a woman had to leave, then someone else would read the item and it would be recorded in the minutes. This process was mainly successful and it also was helpful to the minute taker because several perspectives on the conversation were recorded. We have included the outline we developed for taking minutes at our early WAG meeting. There is also another minutes format included later in this chapter that we began using for another project as people became more advanced at taking minutes. (See Emerging Voices Part II.)
Although the establishment of the WAG was part of the WISH Board’s strategic plan, implementing a process to collect, review and respond to women’s input had its ups and downs. We found out that each of us had a role to play in improving the flow of information back and forth. At one point, women at the WAG refused to comment on an issue until they had heard back from the Board on their other suggestions. This action resulted in the minutes being emailed by literacy instructors to Board members, the WISH newsletter being handed out at all Board meetings and the Executive Director responding in person with the Board’s response to WAG suggestions. Women had found their voice; they wanted to make sure it was being heard.