Invitation to Join Program Committee Meetings First Sunday of Each Month
Published on February, 40 2018
By Program Committee Chairs Teresa Castillo (Fresno branch) and Barbara Nielsen (San Francisco branch)
Our national Program Committee’s 2018 meeting series is on the first Sunday of each month following the inaugural meeting held on Sunday, February 4. Meeting time is 4:30 pm pacific, 6:30 pm central and 7:30 pm eastern. Our plan is for these hour-long planning calls to move our program strategic plan and actions forward via our issues committees, branches, and at-large members to meet our plan goals with measurable results. (If there’s a holiday, we’ll adjust accordingly and announce).
An underlying initial goal of our program committee’s strategic plan and our new Program Chairs is to make the issues and work undertaken by our Issues Committees accessible by our members in branches and groups and by our at-large members, too. Learn more about our Program Strategic Plan by checking out this summary.
A first step toward that goal is to invite and welcome every branch to have a representative participate in our monthly Program calls so that we can exchange information and overcome the “silo” phenomenon of working in parallel but not in conjunction with each other. We can work on outreach to our at-large members for your activism in your communities, as well! Our plan moves us forward in both WILPF membership capacity-building and effective activism in our communities and beyond.
The Program Committee calls have a variety of participants besides the two chairs. They usually include the chair or co-chairs and sometimes more members of each of the national issues committees and any subcommittees that may be operative, our International Board Member when possible, and section members who are interested in the program work we are doing and who are engaged in local activism in their branches or communities. Our Section President, as an ex officio member of all national committees, also participates in our calls when possible!
As we are in capacity-building mode, another step in our information-sharing and activism expansion is our hope to have branches send representatives to join in our monthly program calls (hence our invitation here), but we hope this will be an opportunity for our branches to let us all know about branches’ local activism, too. Looking forward, it would be great for branches to consider sending representatives to our national issues committees’ meetings, but we can talk about that on our Program calls.
If you are not already on our Program Committee listserv, please contact our chairs to ask to be invited to our next meeting. We’d love to have you on our calls, so we can learn and grow in our activism together!
For further info contact the chairs: Teresa Castillo (taca_03@ymail.com); Barbara Nielsen (bln.sf.ca@gmail.com)
