Sexual harassment, racism, and cultural differences are real issues for participants at the Centre. A group of students and tutors began to develop an anti-racism policy and part of their work will include how to implement the policy.

Sexual harassment at the Centre, and violence and/ or lack of support in the home, have kept many women from participating at ALFA. A women's group was formed to provide a safe place for women to upgrade their literacy skills. The group meets every Tuesday afternoon from one to three. When it first came together, the group took on a supporting role and most of the time was spent on discussing specific incidents of harassment and issues of common concern. This worked well for a couple of weeks, but the women also wanted to develop their reading and writing skills. Amele Zewge, the staff person working with the women's group, looked for curriculum materials that dealt with issues the women identified in their discussions.

The woman-positive activity

As their woman-positive activity, ALFA decided to document what happens in an organization when it decides to provide a safe place for women to upgrade their literacy skills. Tannis and Amele started the process by asking each staff member to write their perception of why ALFA wanted to do a woman-positive activity and why they wanted to form the women's group. Amele asked each woman in the group to write about why she thought it was important to have the women's group. Several months later she asked the women to respond in writing to the same question.

Staff encouraged mixed-sex groups in the program to do similar writing with the question, "What do you think of the idea of having a women's group?" Discussion about the women's group had already begun in one of the mixed-sex evening groups. Some of the questions which male students asked were, "What is sexual harassment?", "Does a woman mean no when she says no?" and "Why is there a women's group and not a men's group?" The content of these discussions and the writings originating from them became the basic documentation for the research.

This is what happened

In April of 1992, Dharini Abeysekera, another staff member, initiated a follow-up discussion in the mixed-sex group. Students were asked to talk about the question, "Should women have their own group?" and to write down their thoughts. Out of the twelve students in the group only about seven of them wrote. There were mixed reactions about the women's group. Some supported the women's group and made comments like, "Yes, women need privacy, they can have their own group." Some claimed to have heard nothing about this before (although they were part of the original discussion) and wondered, "Why a women's group?" Some were unhappy but did not say why.