I have enjoyed the luxury of focusing on women in my work and of grappling with all these questions. I have learned a lot and plan to make changes based on what I learned to make the difficult transitions easier for everyone next time - funding permitting. I believe our program is one of very few that offer women a place where they can just be, feel good about themselves and maybe learn something. This has been a pretty inspiring time for me.

Being part of the CCLOW research project at the same time that I facilitated the women's group has been a really intense and rewarding experience. Without reflection and time to dialogue with other people doing the same work, I get isolated and stumble along blindly in my work without learning and without being able to make significant changes. I am determined to structure in more support for me after this research is over. (If I still have a group!)

I have dreams about the future. I imagine that our funders understand women's groups as necessary parts of literacy programs and that they give us enough money to run the groups with the resources we need to do this well. I imagine that I am working more closely with other women's organizations, that I don't feel abandoned in a literacy ghetto. I imagine a more open dialogue in the literacy movement about the ways in which women's issues relate to class and race, about how we might facilitate groups based on collective identifications. I imagine literacy workers valuing their work and demonstrating that in the grant applications we write. I imagine us - women learners and workers - not being so happy making do with so little. I imagine us demanding more. I imagine myself heeding my own words.

________________________
Staff and members of Action Read would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Ontario Women's Directorate, National Literacy Secretariat, and the Ontario Ministry of Education. Anne Moore thanks the members of the women's group.