• The research made visible women's experiences in a variety of literacy programs in different parts of Canada. It raised questions about how women's lives and needs are or are not taken into account in these programs. It demonstrated how funding policies contribute to the ways in which programs ignore the reality of women's lives.
• The research emphasized the difficulties faced by those who ask for attention to be paid to members of marginalized groups. Several women confronted personal and professional risks in starting their woman-positive activities. Others had to deal with ignorance, ongoing passive resistance, and persistent apathy. The research gave women the support to continue despite these obstacles.
• The research allowed some literacy workers time to reflect on their work, to find support from others, and to analyze their common and diverse experiences. It provided extraordinary professional development.
• The research highlighted the lack of information about literacy workers in Canada. Although we know that most adult literacy workers are women, we became increasingly curious about how that fact related to the lack of funding and status for literacy. The research helped the women involved become more aware of their need to take care of themselves.
• The research design and methodology provides a model for program-based action research that begins with frontline workers' lived experiences, involves them in collecting data, analyzing information, and developing solutions to identified problems.

From the beginning, the women involved in this research have been concerned about documenting their findings and making them available to others grappling with similar issues and questions. This research highlights the lack of relevant, woman-positive materials for staff and students in adult literacy programs. It has also made distressingly clear the lack of resources and supports for women attempting to make their workplaces more positive for women. The result is that our findings have been published in three books.

Women in literacy--speak - The power of -woman-positive literacy work includes the material that the programs developed to document their woman-positive activities. This documentation comes primarily from the perspective of program workers, though in some cases programs documented their experiences by publishing student writing. Each piece in this collection grows out of the specific context of a particular program, the community in which it is located, and the woman or women who wrote it. Gaining confidence, taking chances and making choices within the particular context of their lives, they chart the woman-positive ripples of their work. They demonstrate how women's lives are woven together. Uncovering fear and isolation, celebrating diversity and strength, they outline what happened to themselves and to others as they made space for woman-positive literacy work. These pieces test recipes for political action. They pursue the politics of talking and challenge others to consider the more than semantic differences between "woman-positive" and "feminist" practices.