One story-partial as are all the stories here--real as are all the stories here--is potentially very different from other versions that might be told and it's still the truth

• There was always a certain amount of shock value [in women's stories], because the things were shocking and there was never any kind of buffer for dealing with it in a more compassionate way or for the staff person to actually integrate it or anything like that. So there are lines of information coming from within the staff, to women staff. But I think once the women's group was struck and meeting regularly every week, the stories started being told to each other and that was far more important because the women had very similar experiences.

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• [We] tried to be in an environment with them where anything could be said, no matter how shocking, no matter how scary or how tearful it would be. Because those stories built one on top of each other and one of the women with [staff encouragement decided she wanted to write her story. And it in a way had aspects of each of those women's lives.

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• And [two women staff] always did it together because we never knew what would come up. We needed to be there for each other. We needed to talk after. We needed to call in people to help, especially when it came to questions of abuse... We just needed to get it clear what our role was and that we weren't counsellors but that we could hear.

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• The rest of the staff felt that we were draining the organization. So, we had a kind of feminist belief but it turned out to be not very flexible, not a very flexible belief. We believed that this group could stay within its limits and we couldn't because we never knew what was going to happen. We never knew what was going to be said. And the emotional impact on the other women and on us was something that we couldn't anticipate. So, we didn't get enough support from the rest of the collective. We kept asking and we kept bitching and eventually we did. But it took a while. [What kind of support were you looking for?] The time that it was taking. They were wondering why two of us needed to be in the group every week. Why couldn't it be just one person, spelling the other person off kind of thing.

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• It sort of pushed me more in the direction I was going in. To be a witness for people. To be a person who could help them articulate things. To give them freedom to do that. And any practical way to help them take that information further... I wanted to be part of a network of women telling stories.

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• Did we have a right to put a group of women together and then disband that group again? Which is what we did. We had funding to hold a group together for a year and we had no funding after that. And we didn't make a commitment to go after that. And that was the ethical question. [Why didn't you go after the funding.] I don't know. I think that as a whole, as an overall, we were lacking direction from an organizational point of view. The staff was not saying strongly enough that this mattered. We didn't know enough then.

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• I think we do say that having done the women's group, and having discovered certain things, we now let those things change the organization and make it different. And that is true, I guess. But, it could not be true at the same time. And who's there to see if it's true or not?

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• Here we are in the middle [of the program]. We create this safe little forum for a certain group of women. And then we don't make that, we don't sort of take down the walls and make it a bigger place. It's like we kept it all secret. Or it became such a lot of busy work ... that there just wasn't a lot of space for participation... If we did it again, it would be better.

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