A Dream Ten Years old; A BY JOAN MCFARLAND AND SUSAN WITTER CCLOW is now ten years old. Where might we be in another ten years? Where would we like to be? Ten years from now will be 1999-the threshold of the 21st century. Will we be ready for it? In this tenth anniversary issue of Women's Education des femmes, we hear from several of our foremothers: Lynn Fogwill, Greta Nemiroff, Pierrete Carrière, Mairi Macdonald and Joan Brown Hicks. They had a dream, a dream to build an organization devoted to women's learning issues. That dream is now a reality, ten years old. And in those ten years CCLOW has accomplished a lot. We have a strong and impressive organization, a well functioning national office and a dedicated and hard working staff. We have built up a unique resource centre of materials on women's education and training and we are recognized in our advocacy work on women's education and training issues. We have networks in every province and territory and have developed two publications, Minerva and WEdf, as major membership tools we can be justly proud of. We have put on two national conferences: the first, in 1982, in conjunction with Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, the National Action Committee and The Canadian Federation of University Women, on Women and Technology; the second, in 1984, on Women's Education for the Next Decade. We have initiated important research on women's education, training and public policy and we have carried out a number of significant projects, the most notable, perhaps, being the first bridging program for women in Canada. In our recent study, Women's Education and Training in Canada (the WET study), we asked CCLOW members to come up with their visions for the future. These visions have become much broader than those of our foremothers and they describe the kind of world we would like to see, a world where we open up all activities to women and, most particularly, where the possibility exists of a lifelong learning process involving recurring cycles of inquiry. The realization of these visions is a challenging goal to strive for in the next ten years. To meet that challenge, we have made a number of commitments for the upcoming period and we have a wish list of things we are hoping to do. Our commitments include holding, in June, a provincial conference and our annual general meeting in Halifax. Other, ongoing commitments include strengthening our networks (through newly appointed coordinators in each province and territory), continued publication of WEdf, expansion of our advocacy work (particularly in coalitions with other women's organizations), increased concentration on our fundraising activities to lessen our dependence on government, the awarding of a national scholarship for women returning to high school, and two major research projects: on women and literacy and on how women learn. On our wish list are the development of an automated catalogue for our resource centre, the creation a directory and data base on awards, bursaries and scholarships for women, the holding of public policy workshops based on the WET study and the publication of policy action sheets, a social issues policy handbook, and a herstory of CCLOW. Unfortunately, the climate for carrying out our plans and
achieving our goals has changed since the first ten years. We have recently
been informed by the Women's Program, Secretary of State, that our operations
funding will be cut by 15% from last year's level. In the short term, we are
going to be forced to make some painful choices. In the long term, it will
depend on us. Can we lobby successfully, by ourselves and with other women's
groups, to have the Women's Program spending policy reversed? Can we
successfully do the outside fund raising we have been gearing up for to ensure
we can carry on with the commitments we have made and the projects we have
planned? Can we pull together, now more than ever-whatever the obstacles-to
make the next ten years as fruitful and productive as the last ten? |
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