Gather the Women

The Gather the Women idea began to emerge in my consciousness in November 2001, when I started receiving a series of phone calls from WOVA members who felt drawn to share their visions with me. This in itself was an unusual occurrence -- rarely do I get phone calls of this nature. So when I got three calls within a period of a few weeks from WOVA members who did not know each other, all using the same words to express their vision, I knew I was supposed to pay attention. The words each of them used were: "It's time to gather the women... it's time for women's wisdom to come forth."

It was these calls that prompted me, on November 13, 2001, to register the domain name "gatherthewomen," feeling that this action would help to ground the energy of these women's visions. On November 20, I sent an email to the WOVA Board of Directors telling them about the phone calls, about my feelings that it was important for WOVA to help ground this energy, and to advise them of the action I had taken in registering the domain name.

I was, at that time, in the throes of preparing and coordinating the Feminine Face of Leadership Conference and developing the Leading Without Limits Leadership Institute, both taking place on January 31-February 2, 2002. The GTW domain name and idea just sat on the back shelf until after that conference and the flurry of activities it generated, including formation of Global Action Forum (GAF) committees that were to follow up on the two action ideas that came out of the FFL conference: one to create a network of networks, and the other to create a Global Call to Prayer (GCP).

The Gather the Women idea came alive again in March 2002, when I started receiving phone calls from women who were not WOVA members about their vision to gather the women. I told these women that I had registered the domain name and asked if they might be interested in becoming WOVA members and serving on a steering committee to explore what we could do with this vision. They all enthusiastically agreed.

I checked in with the WOVA Board to see how they felt about creating a steering committee to explore a Gather the Women project and they gave me the go-ahead to continue to form the committee as long as committee members were WOVA members and the activities were overseen by the board. Three board members agreed to be involved: Veronica Wolfe and Carolyn Douglas both agreed to sit on the committee and Kimberly Pfeil agreed to design a logo. I continued to work on building a Gather the Women steering committee and helping to coordinate the Global Action Forum committees.

The committee charged with creating a Global Action Forum met a couple of times and then disbanded when a group of programmers from PlanetWork Consortium agreed to start working on the idea and help develop the technology tools needed. At the same time, the Global Call to Prayer committee was encountering some stumbling blocks, so I called two committee members to see how they felt about the idea of trying to morph the GCP into the Gather the Women project. They both got excited about this possibility and volunteered for the GTW steering committee. The GCP committee then disbanded.

About this same time (March 2002), I had the opportunity to read a book entitled, "Birth of the Chaordic Age" by Dee Hock, founder of Visa International, that served as the inspiration of how we could actually gather hundreds of thousands of women throughout the world. Each gathering would be self organizing, and WOVA would provide the Gather the Women website as a hub for connection.

Between March and June I continued to build the Gather the Women steering committee. I invited those women who had called me, and also WOVA members who had attended the Feminine Face of Leadership Conference. I also called WOVA member Lili Fournier from Toronto about her idea of planning a major event on March 8, 2003, in Madison Square Garden. I suggested that we might want to collaborate. WOVA could, perhaps, provide the grassroots Gather the Women movement (whatever that would look like) in conjunction with Lili's planned Women of the World concert. We agreed that the two would remain mutually exclusive events. She was thrilled with the idea and agreed to be placed on the steering committee in order to explore what a collaboration might look like.

In total, 15 women had agreed to serve. Although many members lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had several members from Southern California, one member from Massachusetts, and Lili from Toronto. Most committee members did not know one another. I was the only one who had been in contact with each one personally. How were we ever going to work together on a project of this magnitude when we were operating at long distance? We'd use the Internet, of course!

On June 21, 2002, I asked my husband Victor to set up an email list for our newly formed steering committee and the first messages were posted on June 22.

I asked each steering committee member to post a short bio and a statement  to the list as to why they said "yes" to being on the committee. I felt this was an important step for us to get to know one another.

On the 4th of July, we started working on our first task: an opening statement for the website. The only thing we had agreed on was that the date of the event would be on March 8 to coincide with International Women's Day and Lili's event in New York. On July 7, we began planning a date and location for our first "in-person" meeting (which occurred on September 13 in Corte Madera, CA). On July 8, I took a two-week "leave of absence" from the committee to complete some WOVA tasks that needed my attention. I instructed the group to continue exploring the opening statement and to try to come up with a unified vision.