Women reaching women: change in action – using action learning to help address seemingly intractable and large scale social issues

Abstract

In 2008, 28 women from the Women's Institute volunteered to join us in a project exploring the issue of world poverty and gender inequality, specifically highlighting the disproportionate effects of climate change on women. Collectively we were asking a big question about how we as individuals, based in England, make a difference on a global issue. While initially the focus was on more traditional knowledge exchange it soon became evident that the nature of the group and the importance of the problem leant themselves to a genuinely collective approach and action learning emerged. A number of self-facilitated sets have now formed as a source of support and challenge in addressing the scale of the task. Seeing action as learning and learning as action has been a powerful mechanism in helping the individuals involved feel they can make a difference to their worlds.

Keywords:

• gender
• development
• action learning
• inequality
• self-facilitated

Notes

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