CEO Reflections | IWD Reflection: Are we there yet?!

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

This time last year, we were all navigating through the ‘unprecedented’ impacts of COVID. This year, the pandemic thread weaves into the International Women’s Day theme of Women in Leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world.

In our work, most volunteers and coordinators/managers of volunteers are women, and they have navigated the past year with much resilience. Volunteer West is rallying behind them, to increase their professional visibility. We are marshalling pragmatic resources their way with a plan to support the professional development recognition of coordinators and managers of volunteers, especially those in small to medium organisations.

There is now also another series of ‘unprecedented’ events in Australia's socio-political sphere. There is now a tsunami of #choosetochallenge cri de cœur to fundamentally shift power structures and institutions to a ‘new-normal’ with gender equality and diversity. The past few weeks have shown that this new-normal is still not here in 2021, more than 100 years* from the earliest Women's Day observance in New York in 1909.

*122 years of Women’s Days would have been unfathomable...

The work of social change, the work of #choosetochallenge is incredibly challenging: it can be exhausting, it can be traumatic, it is personal, it can be empowering, it can seem futile, it is hopeful. It is necessarily hopeful that the desired new-normal arrives, and that it arrives sooner rather than later.

I reflect on my first social change work to combat racism over 20 years ago as a university student. In 1999, in founding Mosaic’s cultural diversity and leadership program, I defined success & impact to be that Mosaic need not exist after ten years because cultural diversity should be normal and anti-racism need not be a ‘cause’ by 2009. As an impatient young adult, a decade for change seemed more than sufficient.

 

I am necessarily hopeful that in a decade's time, by 2031, Women’s Day need not be a cause anymore.


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