For example, every summer we will have a leadership training institute to bring together twenty-five to thirty women from around the world, who will then get a chance to exchange their skills and experiences. As well, they will have the opportunity to talk about what any particular issue means globally and how we might begin to change that at a conceptual level. So it will be both a very practical and a conceptual exchange taking place.

Sharon: You spoke earlier about "training" not being the kind of word that you want to use to describe this type of work. What is the problem that you see with it? What do you think we could use instead?

Charlotte: It's an interesting point, because I think the problem with the word "training", as with so much of our language, is that it implies a hierarchical process in which one group of people has the skills and another group of people receives the skills. What we as feminists are always struggling with is that, though we do train each other, it's not always such a linear process. When possible, I use the term "empowerment", but it also has problems. Empowerment implies that power is some sort of quantity that you either have or don't have. I don't know any word that really gets around it.

Charlotte Bunch (left) and Roxanna Carrillo (from Peru) at an international planning meeting, the Centre for Global Studies and Women's Leadership.

One of my hesitations about using "training" in relation to leadership is the very static notion of leadership then implied: that there are skills to being a leader that you can give somebody to become a leader. We're looking at women who are already taking leadership. Not so much focusing on being individual leaders, but on the fact that they are taking leadership in their organizing, writing, or conceptualizing about an issue.

We really want more of a leadership exchange than a training in that regard. I think that we need words that imply the ongoing process of learning and exchanging that takes place for all of us in the learning environment.