By May 1991, three of the four programs involved in phase one had expressed interest. Shortly after CCLOW published the phase one report, five other women called to indicate their interest. They had received the report through the informal networking of women in literacy and through involvement in CCLOW. There were now three programs in Ontario, two in British Columbia, and one each in Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories expressing interest.

After some outreach on the prairies and in the Maritimes, a second Alberta program and programs from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island came forward. CCLOW did some outreach to union-based programs which resulted in a second Saskatchewan program.

By early October, fourteen programs had applied to participate. There was a mix of rural and urban, northern and southern programs. They represented a wide variety of program models: community-based and community college programs; a public housing, prison, and union program; a Friendship Centre; a program that worked with urban immigrant women primarily from the Caribbean; a program that worked primarily with northern Inuit women; and a program that worked with Aboriginal women.

Women who participated in these programs as students ranged from those involved in basic literacy work to those preparing to write grade 12 equivalency exams. Some of the programs already included women-only groups in their structure. Other programs had never before considered working with women as a particular student group. Every woman who expressed interest either had a very clear picture of what she wanted to do or was able to imagine several possibilities.

A teleconference meeting of advisory committee members, the researcher, and CCLOW staff set out to choose ten programs to participate and to discuss contingency plans should the final funding not come through in time for the workshop. In the end, twelve of the fourteen programs became part of the research.

During the first six months of the project two contact women from each program worked with the coordinating researchers to pull together a description of their community, program, and woman-positive activity. During the last six months they developed a description of what happened as a consequence of the activity including, in most cases, some documentation and interpretation of the process. The descriptions make up the majority of this chapter and the program documentation can be found in Women in literacy women speak - The power of woman- positive literacy work. What follows in the next section is more particular information about the women who worked as coordinating and program researchers throughout the twelve-month process.