الورشات

Working with our full network of partner organizations, we implement grassroots leadership workshops in 18 countries using our signature training manual Leading to Choices: A Leadership Training Handbook for Women.  Leading to Choices is available in 15 culture-specific adaptations, each carefully translated, tested, and adapted by WLP in cooperation with women's activists indigenous to the intended audience.

Leading to Choices leadership workshops are guided by a new participatory leadership methodology designed to empower women, enabling them to develop the leadership skills to transform their families, communities, and societies. We believe that good leadership is based on the ability to communicate, listen, build consensus, and work in partnership with allies to develop a shared vision and implement an action plan. Everyone can be a leader and, at various times, both a leader and a follower.  Sharing power and respect creates a strong group identity that both empowers individuals to achieve personal goals and mobilizes the group for collective action 

Workshops have enabled women to develop strong leadership and communication skills, built their self-confidence, and supported them to engage in collective action, leading to change at the personal, community, and civic levels.  Participants in WLP trainings have gone on to change the division of labor in their families, take on new responsibility at work, run for local office, establish food cooperatives and other economic projects, and coordinate campaigns, among other activities.

Recent Workshops

Leadership Workshop in Mbouda, Cameroon, 12-14 December, 2005

32 women and two men, predominantly engaged in small-scale subsistence farming, attended the workshop.  They identified strategies for tackling the challenges they face in agricultural production, and decided to raise awareness in their communities about the rights of peasant farmers.

Leadership Workshop in Kaédi, Mauritania, 9-11 November, 2005

30 leaders of women's organizations from each department of Kaédi, the capital of the remote Gorgol region, attended the workshop. Participants identified the need for stronger bonds of solidarity between women's organizations operating in the same region and committed to forming a network, to be coordinated by WLP's Mauritanian partner.

Leadership Workshop in Mardin, Turkey, November-December, 2005

15 women attended the workshop, which focused on building appreciation of diversity because participants lived in a region where many different ethnic groups live side-by-side.  A group of participants decided  to begin an outreach effort  on behalf of WLP's Turkish partner to determine the needs of immigrant women and children in their communities.

Leadership Workshop in Beit Fajar, Palestine, October-December, 2005

20 women attended the workshop, the majority of whom were married with children.  They discussed the challenges of communicating with their families and balancing family responsibilities with work or volunteerism outside the home.  After the workshop, one participant resolved tensions with her sons about her volunteer work at the Women's Center by taking them to the Center and demonstrating the importance of her work there.  Another widowed participant gained the confidence to speak to her parents to let them know she was not ready to remarry.

Leadership Workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August-September, 2005

A diverse group of 19 women aged from 20-64 participated in the workshop to test the new Portuguese edition of "Leading to Choices." Based on their feedback, final adaptations were made to the manual, which will be published in 2006.