Hey everyone,

I really enjoyed the presentation last week. I would be interested in being involved in a Zonta group or a UN Women's club on campus. Should somebody contact Clare about this?

Video: Version 1 (not final!)

Here is our first draft of our video. It is very rough and full of information. At this point in the process, we knew this information was important, but we also didn't want to bore our audience to tears, so we became very frustrated with the video. We were overwhelmed by the injustices women face around the world, but we knew the purpose of our video was not just to focus on the negative aspect of women oppression. We wanted to speak about how far women have come (by talking about the history of International Women's Day and displaying inspiring successful women from the past). We then wanted to focus on the future - where women still need egalitarian rights (as outlined by the UN Millenium Goals). It was an exciting process. There were staggering facts that displayed the oppression of women, but also exciting facts about where women have come.

We knew that our advocacy work was to raise awareness to the attendees of the International Women's Day Gala. We can celebrate, but we can't just stop there.

We showed the first draft of our video to Clare and she thought that it needed some fixing up. She also requested that we change it to more celebratory, and she recommended inspiring women we could utilize, including Kim Campbell, Sandra Oh, and many others.

In a way it was frustrating because it felt like we were starting over, but we understood that advocacy work can be like that sometimes. But as we began to work on the second draft of the video, we had so much information and groundwork laid, that it wasn't half as difficult as making the first copy.

As a side note:
During our group process we used this blog as a mode of information sharing, but we also used email to communicate logistics (especially since our mentor checked the email much more than she checked the blog). Unfortunately, in the process, I believe some information was passed over email that never made it to the blog.

pics from the gala continued

pics from the gala

Add caption

Add caption

Thanks for posting the video and speech Jenelle. It helps us to continue the reflection of the work we helped out with and what still could be done. Thanks for the good group too, everyone! Have a great summer.

International Women's Day video

Hi everyone,

I know the video is posted somewhere in this blog but I just wanted to post it again. I just wanted to post an embedded version.

If you want to watch it in its actual youtube page, just click the screen of the video and a new page would pop up directing you to the actual page.

So I know we are planning on posting things from our poster presentation from class so I thought I would also post the speech that Jen and I read at the Gala (that Jen wrote)

We are representing a group of eight students from the McMaster School
of Social Work. Since January we have been working alongside the
Women’s Interval House in preparation for this day. We have been
preparing a video which you are about to see which we feel informs on
women’s issues and celebrates women’s achievements over the last one
hundred years.

We had quite the experience in the making of this video. The research
process began as a somber one, as we found that the plight of women’s
inequity remains all over the world. We also found startling facts –
how the wage gap still widens, how one in three women around the world
have experienced some form of abuse, and how the UN Millennium Goals
are still so far from being met worldwide.

But we also read about great women – about women who have changed the
world in many ways. We learned about Louise Arbour, the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, Senator Anne Cools, the first black
person elected to the Canadian senate and a founder of one of the first
women’s shelters in Canada, Dr. Samantha Nutt, the founder of World
Child International which provides humanitarian aid to children
affected by war, and Margaret Atwood, a critically acclaimed Canadian
writer. These stories inspired us and reminded us that social change
is possible.

We’ve been learning in the classroom that social change is slow.
Problems must be viewed as public, not as private, and this can be done
through “consciousness raising”. People must remember that their
problems are not unique and result from oppressive structures. As
experiences are shared, people begin to mobilize to create change. So
where do we go from here? The inequities do not have to last forever.
Global attitudes must change towards women. Abuse can end. The wage
gap can disappear. We’ve come far in the past century. In this
country, we’ve gained the right to vote, the right to hold office,
we’ve had a female prime minister, we travel to foreign countries
alone, we’ve become CEOs, and we’ve left the home to go to work. We
can keep moving forward and removing the barriers that are in our way.
There’s three and a half billion of us after all.

So without further ado, here is our video: