What skills do women need to bring about change in their communities?
The last in our series of guest posts on the theme of women, learning, literacy and liberation – for International Women’s Day and beyond – comes from Amanda Wait, ‘Welcome to Bolton’ Co-ordinator, WEA North West Region.
There is no statistic more maddening to me at the moment than the stubbornly shallow slope that half-heartedly informs us how very little headway women in the UK have made towards taking their places in Parliament. Kyrgyzstan, Namibia and South Sudan manage to just pip us at the post yet again, while Rwanda, Sweden and Senegal romp away to the sunlit uplands of unimaginable ratios of women in government. What is going on?
And yet, if I un-crick my neck from balefully fixating on the glass ceiling waiting for change and I look around me in my local community, I see women (and it is, in the majority, women)…well…doing things! Organising the food banks, opposing the library closures, blagging the raffle prizes, offering support for bereavement or breastfeeding, debt counselling or dyslexia, holding meetings, planning, campaigning to bring about change.
Call it the ‘Big Society’ if you want to – it was here before the term was coined and looks like remaining when it is quietly buried. There’s no pay, no real career structure, no great barriers to entry. It’s a strange, uncontested area, where women can freely come together, collaborate and contribute. A lot of it is off the radar, overlooked, yet it is a vast body of knowledge and experience, practise and learning that I, and many other women I know, could never have learned in other jobs, other institutions.
The project I’m currently working on is bringing together volunteers from Bolton with people from newly arrived communities to develop community activities promoting befriending, skill sharing and support for language and literacy. Women from around the corner and across the world came together over the last month to organise an International Women’s Day celebration. Women who are refugees and asylum seekers from Iran, Ethiopia, Palestine, Sudan, Eritrea, Iraq and Congo were involved: organising the event, demonstrating their skills, interpreting and taking on supporting roles on the day.
This body of experience and knowledge is increasingly essential in the UK as we see the tide go out on civic and local structures funded through public expenditure. But here’s the mismatch: women’s experience of organising at this level has neither worked as an escalator or a conveyor belt to the pearly gates of power and it hasn’t delivered an increase in formal representation to influence the world as we currently know it. In fact, we have actually seen a decline in women’s representation in the UK Parliament. Women’s knowledge and experience of how things work at grass roots level just isn’t ‘trickling up’ to feature in decision-making at policy level and what’s telling, despite universal suffrage and education, is the enduring stubbornness to embrace or represent these other perspectives, these other ways of ‘doing’ power.
Coming together to work on this level means sharing learning of all kinds. It means valuing collaborative working and acknowledging the importance of diverse contributions to build the whole picture. The roles of teacher, learner and volunteer swap and change as we identify both our strengths and the gaps in our knowledge as we focus on building something, bringing it about, and its helping to transform our perspectives about what we can do. We’ve all been learning something, building our knowledge and our confidence. Although this is just a snapshot – a taster of what we can do in a few weeks if we come together as a group – it raises lots of questions for me as a practitioner. What skills do women bring through their involvement in community activity? What skills do they develop as part of this involvement and what are the skills they need to bring about change in the place they live?
