LEADERSHIP for SOCIAL CHANGE
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IWP facilitates trainings on Leadership for Social Change for grassroots women's groups from Burma , Thailand and India . In South and Southeast Asia, women, as well as men, have been socialized and have internalized hierarchical, power-over type leadership as the only possible model for organizing.
This socialization has often created groups and organizations with power centered at the leader(s), who are often elders or people who have many sources of power within their communities. This makes it difficult for both individual members and groups to effectively work together to solve their community problems, and in the long term, it becomes an obstacle for a sustainable social change movement. Thus, we feel it is essential to provide an opportunity for women to experience and learn different ways that they can relate and work together to transform themselves, which will eventually affect the structural level. |
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Our trainings not only focus on concepts and skills building, but also behavior and attitude changes. We do training for transformation at the personal level in order to affect structural changes. Through experiential learning, trainings help participants understand collective leadership, using a feminist power analysis to analyze women and gender issues and to make the integral links between nonviolence, power sharing and gender justice. |
There is always a component of confidence and trust building among participants, in order to build a team during the training, as well as to establish the foundation for the participants becoming a support network for one another after the training ends.
Our follow-up to the Leadership for Social Change trainings is often a training of trainers ( TOT ). We feel that for long-term sustainability and impact, it is important to train trainers so that women can adapt the concepts, skills and activities to be relevant to their own cultural and political contexts. |
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A major component of the TOT is to help participants understand themselves more deeply, before they reach out to support others in that process. From our experience we have learned that in order to train people to be effective as community leaders or trainers, it is critical for them to be affirmed of their potentiality. At the same time, they must also be aware of the challenges that they inherited through socialization, such as the internalization of gender oppression, and the traditional hierarchical power over style of leadership. And so, after a ‘safe container' and trust are built with the support of the group and experienced trainers, participants are challenged to do their own personal transformational work (that involves emotions and feelings) in order to help them overcome barriers that block them from becoming more effective leaders and trainers. |
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