Acknowledgments

The Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women (CCLOW), founded in 1979, is a national, voluntary feminist organization with networks in every province and territory in Canada. CCLOW stresses equality between women and men by promoting equal participation in our educational, political, economic, legal, social and cultural systems. To overcome discrimination based on gender, age, race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation, CCLOW focuses on improving educational and learning systems.

CCLOW supports formal, non-formal, lifelong and experiential learning and adult education based on feminist principles of equality.

Background:

The idea for this guide started a few years ago when the New Brunswick CCLOW network published Breaking the Barriers: Women and Continuing Education, a handbook for women interested in returning to school.

Several CCLOW BC members thought that a similar handbook would be very useful for British Colombian women. As adult educators, counsellors, and researchers, we knew that one of the biggest struggles facing women who were thinking of going back to school or getting further training was to find information about programs and support services.

We also knew that information and counselling services for women were disappearing as funds for public services were being decreased.

Over two years ago several members of the BC network began the process of developing this guide. Hundreds of hours of volunteer effort were required and many CCLOW members were involved. CCLOW-BC owes a great deal of thanks to our inspired writer and researcher Nora D. Randall.

We are also very grateful to Priti Shah for her advice on how to make this book useful to immigrant women and for writing the first drafts of the chapter, I want to work in Canada.

As we developed the book we realized that the task of creating a handbook that could address all the issues women face as they think about going back to school was enormous.

We hope that this handbook is useful to a wide variety of women who are in many different situations, but we know there are limitations.