Brainstrorming and vision for our work in today's call - some thoughts...

Hi all,

One of our goals today is to welcome new members and to begin what will be an ongoing talk about our initiative and what members would like to do in and with women's groups in Haiti and for women and girls.

I have taken the liberty of identifying four areas that represent key topics/areas of interest of some of our members, and/or are thing we initially discussed in response to diff people's visits to Haiti and our initial conversations with women leaders there.

While the national rebuilding plan focuses mostly on key sectors of rebuilding, some of our members have main interest/strengths in:

1) advocacy and policy -- we are all supporters of broad goal of pushing women's equality in Haiti, women's full participation in rebuilding, gender mainstreaming in all aspects of national planning, and also actually doing advoacy and policy work as intl allies with and supporting Haitian women's movement....

2) centralizing communication (Media project)- being a hub & media platform about Haitian women, girls and activities: we have a few journalists in print, radio, blogging among us, but more importantly, the one main contribution Haitian women leaders discussed was need for centralized info, to learn about who was doing what, what was becoming available, to have a place for their voices, to report upon and dissemintate their concerns, visions, etc. that is where my personal thought for a newsletter emerged.. but also blogging, video mulitimedia internet and radio -- so a MEDIA PROJECT is well in order

3) Health: this includes needs of homeless and pregnant women; need for women's health period; alliance work on gender-based violence; needs of newly disabled women and girls

4) grassroots women's Economic recovery.. we have members from Lambi Fund of Haiti, and dwafanm who have experience in areas of funding grassrots women's groups -- focus on poverty alleviation .. this includes income generation, microfinance, agriculture etc.. so this is also a critical area

ALSO:

5) Also, though we haven't focused as much on this, we have members with expertise in Education and Arts/Culture - and some may want to focus a lot on this

Which also leads to topic of GIRLS:

I don't think we have as much direct expertise in our group on GIRLS but it's a critical group we care about andwant to focus on...

and relates to education - so some focus on Girls will be in order, and we can discuss

Obviously there's a lot here but we could look at people taking up areas of interest, beginning to report, outreach and inform us about activities in these areas - and use the overall and across-all sectors mission of Gender Advocacy (incl Policy work using tools incl the Gender Shadow Report, regional meetings, possible Women's Summit etc. for that).. We have a lot of groups globally to reach out to! in all these sectors, and many groups in Haiti too!

One thing to begin discussing today is what kind of STRUCTURE we'd like our initiative to have - how formal, how loose... there's many possibilities, from the open 'chapter' structures of activist groups that have a central core organizing communication, and chapters in many places that take up diff activities in agreement with overall principles (the model favored in political movements... like the ACT UP model - with ACT UP NY, ACT UP Paris, etc.. allows for a lot of local focus, actions, autonomy, but linkage and coordinated national, intl actions...)

and many others...

Finally, I wanted to put on table for today's call one emerging thought.. OUR NAME -- possible tweak of it.

Poto Mitan: Rebuilding Haiti is a mouthful, and people automatically resort to Poto Mitan - which is name of a separate documentary group and film about Haitian women, and name of a publishing group (Vedrine), and many diff groups have used poto mitan - a common Haitian phrase. I really liked the blogname for our group that Alice created: potofann (poto - pillar or centerpost... and fanm - woman.. as in Women being the Pillar of Haitian society -- the key concept of our name and metaphor for the rebuilding. I think potofanm actually says it better and is simpler, shorter name. Easy to tweak and put this out as we haven't yet done much to promote our group and are in this critical identity-formation ,public branding stage of development.

So I'd like to put this on the agenda for discussion today.
talk to all soon

remember call in number is:

1-270-400-2000

and the CORRECT passworkd (include the #dash after) is:

162475#

talk soon all!

ac