How does change happen – a wrap up

The Forum is now over, but we encourage you to check the "Latest News" section of this site for selected session writeups, transcripts, and other post-forum information. Updates will be posted throughout December and January.

Forum Programme

Plenary Session: Sunday, October 30, 11:30 - 13:15

How do you make sense of four days of intense discussion, debate and deliberation? What can we conclude about what change processes have worked and can work in terms of advancing the rights of women in all our regions? What new big ideas have emerged at this Forum that will be remembered for years or could have a big impact on the way we act, think, or do our work when we leave the Forum? Be part of this participatory closing plenary and hear from these wise women of all ages who will creatively show us all just how change happens.

Geetanjali Misra, (moderator) is Executive Director, CREA (Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action), New Delhi. She has worked at activist, grant making and policy levels in fields such as sexuality, reproductive rights and violence against women. She is also the co-founder of SAKHI for South Asian women in New York. She is the incoming President of AWID's Board of Directors and will serve from 2006-2007.

Maria Alejandra Scampini Franco is the Coordinator of the programme on political influence and Advisor on Education, Gender and Citizeship for Red De Educacion Popular Entre Mujeres (REPEM) and ICAE . She has a Masters of Education at the Catholic University of Uruguay. She works closely with Development Alternatives for Women of a New Era (DAWN) and has published articles for various e-bulletins and other publications. Alejandra is a teacher and a feminist who strives to grow continuously. She is in constant equilibrium between these two passions and is passionate about everything she does.

Bella Matambanadzo is a Zimbabwean feminist. She is currently the Zimbabwe Programme Manager for the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, OSISA. OSISA, part of the global network of Open Society foundations established by philanthropist George Soros is a human rights foundation working in nine southern African countries. Bella is a journalist who has written widely on women's rights. She part of a team that is working on a film about how transformation happens in African women's lives. The film will be the subject of a panel discussion at AWID.

Yvonne Underhill-Sem has been involved with DAWN for six years mostly as Pacific Regional Co-ordinator and currently collaborates with the Fiji Women's Rights Movement based in Suva, Fiji. Of Cook Islands and New Zealand heritage, she has taught at universities in Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia and she has also been an independent scholar in Samoa and Germany before working with the Secretariat of the Africa, Caribbean, Pacific Group of States (ACP) in Brussels. As a feminist geographer, she currently teaches gender and development, critical population studies, and Pacific geography at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Lisa VeneKlasen is the co-founder and director of Just Associates, a global advocacy support network dedicated to strengthening the strategies, impact, leadership, organizations and movements of groups committed to women's equality and social and economic justice. In this work, she draws upon 25 years as an activist, popular educator and political strategist in the US, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Though a consistent feminist, her work has often taken her outside of women's rights agendas and navigating local and global arenas. Today, much of her work focuses on bridge building across justice agendas and on bringing politics and movement back into social change work by grounding advocacy and advocates in the local realities of inequality.