Women Reaching Women: a story of change. The role of narrative in building trust and commitment during an action research project

Abstract

Women Reaching Women was a three-year action research project aimed at raising awareness of world poverty, gender inequality and climate change. The project brought together the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, Oxfam, the Everyone Foundation and a unique group of 28 women drawn from Women’s Institutes across the country. The project explored what motivates us as individuals to act and how to overcome a limited sense of personal agency in comparison with the scale of gender and international development issues. Narrative was central to creating a strong sense of commitment to the project and building the necessary trust between the participants, enabling them to deal with the challenging content. In utilising personal and evocative narratives both within a series of workshops and through the action research cycle reports (produced annually), this paper argues that the women involved were more able to engage with the ‘wicked problems’ inherent in gender and international development. This paper also responds to an acknowledged gap in the literature in terms of gender, international development and climate change. The literature on wicked problems appears to focus on links with action research, policy development and networks, but there is little from the perspective of gender and action research in informal adult education.

Keywords:

• action research
• wicked problems
• trust
• narratives
• collaboration

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Steering Group for its support of the dissemination of the work of the project. She would also like to thank the reviewers of this paper for their constructive and insightful feedback.

Notes

1. The WI consists of 70 Federations encompassing 6500 local WIs with a total of 205,000 individual members.

2. Exert from a ‘Postcard to Myself’; after the first conference all the Federation representatives involved wrote postcards to themselves (which were posted back three months after the event).

3. The ‘Sisters’ DVD was made by Oxfam and features the stories of four women, in both rich and poor countries, who are determined to do whatever they can to put a stop to climate change. See http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/climate_change/sisters/index.html.

4. See http://www.thewi.org.uk/standard.aspx?id=10600.