It runs from 8:45 to 3:30 from Monday to Thursday. At the time of the research there were eight women enrolled in the program, three working on their GED and five working at the grade 5 to 10 level. LaVera Schiele is the full-time instructor. The average age of the women involved in upgrading is similar to that in the general prison population, clustering around 26 to 28 and ranging from 18 to late 40s. The class is organized around individual study, small group projects, and workshops.

Involvement in the CCLOW research project

Wanita Koczka, the deputy director at Pine Grove, is provincial network coordinator for CCLOW in Saskatchewan. She met Betty-Ann Lloyd, the coordinating researcher for the women and literacy project, at the annual CCLOW conference held in Saskatoon in 1991. Both Wanita and Betty-Ann became excited about the possibilities for Pine Grove's participation, given its current philosophy.

The woman-positive activity

After discussions with Annette Neustadter, the Centre's director, and after LaVera Schiele was hired as program instructor, women at the Centre began to discuss possible activities. Eileen Gorman, the community training coordinator, attended the first national workshop with La Vera and they began to look at what women inmates identify as their needs once they leave Pine Grove. After talking with the women in the upgrading program, they decided to create crisis resource booklets for different regions of the province.

The women in the class wrote a crisis scenario that they were familiar with and then worked out what resources are, or are not, available in their communities to help women deal with such a crisis. They worked individually, as a group, and with the larger inmate population to identify both informal and organized sources of assistance.

This is what happened

This project was woman-positive for many reasons. First, it acknowledged that the everyday lives of many women in conflict with the law take place in a context of crisis. This is a reality for women that is often ignored by the justice system and by the government agencies set up to provide social services. Second, it acknowledged that the women themselves are expert not only at identifying the crises in their lives, but also at identifying what they need in order to deal with these crises.

Third, by giving women the option of writing the scenarios, the program acknowledged that their way of telling their story should be the authorized version of what happens in their lives. Fourth, it acknowledged that informal, peer networks of support are as important as social agency and charitable support. Fifth, it acknowledged that women can learn to trust their gut-level response, a response that is often spiritual and emotional as well as rational. It gave women space to talk and write about the quality as well as the quantity of their lives.